Tuneful Rivette: Haut Bas Fragile

The brilliant Jacques Rivette's latest film, The Duchess of Langeais, opens next weekend in NYC. The film is a period romance, adapted from a story by Balzac, about a doomed relationship. Rivette is one of the most underrated of French filmmakers — despite having started as part of the inner core of the New Wave, his work is incredibly hard to see in America, with all of his films up through the early '80s unavailable at the current time on DVD. Thus, I offer up a sequence from one of the MIA features, his "musical," Haut bas fragile(1995). The film is a joyfully self-conscious affair that continues in the lineage of Godard's Une Femme Est Une Femme, offering stars who can only mildly carry a tune acting out the most blissful of movie-musical cliches as they sashay around the set. In this scene, Marianne Denicourt (who had "the Audrey Tautou look" when Tautou herself was still a schoolgirl) and Natalie Richard break into a song and dance. For further info on the great Rivette, I refer you to this terrific web resource:
The Order of the Exile: Jacques Rivette


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Uncle Jean makes the scene

I bow to no one in my slavish ardor for the man who gives us God-art, the one and only JLG. A new box set of four of his “late period” works has been released by Lionsgate (“late” only in that they were made after his “comeback” to fiction film in the 1980s). The box has a few small drawbacks: the two best films in the set were put on the same disc; the cover has an anachronistic 1960s pic of Uncle Jean; and the video-essay he made about Passion is not included in the package (that is the perfect supplement for the film; no trailers are included either). What is there to celebrate about the set? Well, it does present gorgeously restored copies of two of his post-comeback masterpieces, films that are as tightly structured and, yes, accessible as the work he did in his “golden period” in the Sixties, Passion (1982) and First Name Carmen (1983). The other two features in the set, Detective (1985) and Helas Pour Moi (the English translation title, Oh, Woe is Me is rather stilted), contain some of the biggest stars in French cinema (Johnny Hallyday, Nathalie Baye, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Julie Delpy in the first; Gerard Depardieu in the second), but they are films that, while entertaining (some scenes in Detective are wonderfully funny), do seem like they were produced in an improvisatory fashion that favored dialogue over character and plot. Passion and Carmen, on the other hand, are underrated gems that deserve multiple viewings. In celebration of the set, I offer a glimpse at Godard playing his cinematic alter-ego, crazy “Uncle Jean,” a role he debuted in Carmen and then reprised in a few of his 1980s and ’90s features. The character was clearly based on what the public perception of JLG was: a slightly batty older man who spoke in epigrams and wasn’t quite conscious of the world around him.


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