Up, Down, Fragile Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

Up, Down, Fragile Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 9, 2023

Richard Peña has had to talk quite a bit about Jacques Rivette lately, given Cohen Media Group's many releases of Rivette's at times challenging filmography, releases which have frequently featured commentaries by Peña. That may be one reason why the commentary on this disc actually echoes some of Peña's earlier work, including repeating the fact that Rivette, while an important participant and arguably founder of the French New Wave, never really experienced the kind of audience acclaim that some of his contemporaries did. Peña frames that lack of appeal in this particular instance by comparing this film to a lesser remembered American musical from 1953, Give a Girl a Break, a film which despite its general lack of renown will certainly be recognized by lovers of dance, since it features not only Marge and Gower Champion but also Bob Fosse. Peña makes this connection not just because of some surface story similarities, in that each film features a trio of women, but also due to the fact that Give a Girl a Break was produced without a lavish budget, as was Up, Down, Fragile, and the somewhat debatable assertion that Up, Down, Fragile is a musical, though it might be more accurate to simply state that the film is as close to a musical as Rivette ever got. It might actually be more salient to compare this film to another lesser remembered outing which featured three women, namely 3 Women, in that Rivette's approach toward storytelling is probably more like Robert Altman's than Stanley Donen's, as well as the fact that the Altman film, while ostensibly about, well, three women, actually tends to focus more firmly on only two of them, which is pretty much exactly what Rivette's film does as well.

Ninon (Nathalie Richard) is the first of the three women to be introduced, and as Richard Peña mentions in his commentary, the vignette that introduces her also starts a supposed "musical comedy" (two of three genres Peña states the IMDb cites as describing the film) out with either a friend, criminal conspirator or perhaps a pimp who knows Ninon engaging in a knifing which is assumedly a murder. That sets Ninon out on an attempt to escape her former life, whatever that was, since, per long established Jacques Rivette tradition, details are often left up to the viewer to divine. In rather rapid succession, the two other women in the story are also introduced. Louise (Marianne Denicourt) has an intriguing backstory which isn't overly explained, but which is at least alluded to enough that it becomes clear she has just awoken from a years long coma and is trying to reestablish herself in the world. Ida (Laurence Côte) is a librarian who is an orphan and who gazes upon middle aged women who wander into her facility, wondering if they might be a long lost mother.

As evidenced by Give a Girl a Break itself, not to mention innumerable other Hollywood productions, there's a long tradition of introducing disparate characters with apparently vastly variant stories which then kind of magically get woven together, but Rivette is not a "traditionalist" in that sense, and while there are "crossover" events between some of the characters, that may not be an especially salient plot device, and in fact, like so much in Rivette's oeuvre, can seem positively random at times. There is a male character named Roland (André Marcon) who is something like connective tissue tethering the three female characters together, but even that element isn't utilized like it probably would have been in an American film.

There's a certain sweetness to elements of this film that may help it resonate with viewers, though anyone coming to this expecting a musical even like non-Hollywood French produced efforts such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or The Young Girls of Rochefort is probably going to come away from this film seriously perplexed. A lot of the music in the film is quasi- diagetic, in that it's performed by singers in clubs and the likes. When there are what might be termed more traditional "book" inspired musical interludes, even those can seem to more or less erupt out of nowhere, and several of them also feature some kind of weird choreography that is almost more like interpretive dance than what "traditional" musical lovers may be used to.

Up, Down, Fragile Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Up, Down, Fragile is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Media Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. As with previous Jacques Rivette films released by the label, this one has been sub-branded with both the Cohen Film Collection and Classics of French Cinema imprints. The re-release trailer included on this disc as a supplement touts a 4K restoration, as does the front cover, which remain the sole technical data points I've been able to track down. As with Cohen's recent release of Secret Defense, this is another really gorgeous looking transfer a lot of the time, one that reproduces Rivette's often gorgeous palette with some appealingly vivid hues. Detail levels are typically excellent throughout the presentation, faltering only slightly in a couple of dimly lit interior scenes as well as some of the interstitial "fly on the wall" outdoor material, a lot of which features Ninon on a moped making deliveries. Grain is tightly resolved throughout.

Up, Down, Fragile Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Up, Down, Fragile features DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 in the original French. The film's score may or may not appeal to various audience members since it's not really lushly orchestrated for the most part, though it is kind of whimsically arranged at times for small combo and what sounds like occasional additional color courtesy of chime like glockenspiels or something of that general ilk. None of the performers is exactly a Broadway belter, and so the sung elements here have a much more lightweight, cabaret style feel a lot of the time. All of this said, music is delivered without any issues. Dialogue is also presented cleanly and clearly throughout. As is Cohen's arguably questionable standard operating procedure, English subtitles are forced.

Up, Down, Fragile Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Original Trailer (HD; 1:45)


• Re-release Trailer (HD; 00:56)


• Audio Commentary by Richard Peña, Director Emeritus New York Film Festival & Professor of Film and Media Studies, Columbia University is accessible under the Audio Menu.

Up, Down, Fragile Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Richard Peña isn't the only one having to comment repeatedly about Jacques Rivette, as this very review may make abundantly clear. I have mixed feelings about Rivette's filmography as a whole, even if Peña asserts that Rivette was more of a "critics' filmmaker" than one who instantly appealed to large swaths of the viewing populace. Up, Down, Fragile is at least somewhat more straightforward than some of Rivette's other pieces, but it may simply be too much of a soufflé to sustain what some may argue is another seriously bloated Rivette running time (once again as with some other Rivette films, this one runs close to three hours). Still, the cast is largely wonderful (Denicourt in particular has a kind of Gwyneth Paltrow meets Michele Williams gamine quality which is quite engaging), and the locations are often sumptuous, delivered with appealingly lush cinematography. Technical merits are solid, and at least for those with a taste for something a bit unusual, Up, Down, Fragile comes Recommended.