Event Information

Mezzanine presents: UP DOWN FRAGILE (Haut bas fragile) directed by Jacques Rivette. 1994, 169m, France. L.A. premiere of a new 2K restoration. ~ One of French master Jacques Rivette’s most gentle and enchanting films, this summer romance-musical is inspired by the taxi-dance halls of 1920s and 1930s America, where gentlemen would visit and pay to dance with “a bevy of pretty, vivacious, and often mercenary” women. The women in question are the upper-class Louise (Marianne Denicourt), recently awakened from a coma; Ninon (Nathalie Richard), a street-smart parcel courier; and Ida (Laurence Cote), a university librarian in search of her birth mother. As Rivette typically weaves mysterious plot threads through verite Parisian streets, he also revels in the full physicality and vulnerability of his actresses, who have never been better—and who, in lovingly amateurish fashion, collaborated on much of the film’s original music (and dialogue) themselves. The movie also features Anna Karina as a lounge singer, a nod to the film’s meta-musical forebear A Woman is a Woman, and joins its lineage as a bright and playful work of art. In French with English Subtitles. Special thanks to Tim Lanza. “What’s fascinating in this film is the way the characters circle around each other and position themselves in expectation, not only in the dance numbers but in the film as a whole… Showing the whole body (as Hawks did) was perhaps the key aspect of Rivette’s filmmaking… The question of how a musical works, how to live in a musical, and how a fake city is like a real city: these are the rules and gravitational pull of Haut bas fragile.” -Miriam Bale, Senses of Cinema ~ 2220 screening policy: To respect our audience and the filmmaker, the box office will close shortly after the screening begins. Ticketholder admission is not guaranteed if guest arrives more than 15 min after announced screening time. Presented by Mezzanine. This is an age 21+ event.