Jacques Rivette. Once again showing us summertime Paris and looking for adventures in it. And once again he succeeds in that. It's like the whole movie is in slow motion and I guess it does not surprise anyone familiar with the work of this great director, but this does not make the movie boring, but rather magical, during the movie we slowly move into a world, where nothing happens as it would happen in real life (a girl collects all her stuff in shoe-boxes, another cures herself from vertigo with a shock therapy by a card game), but everything seems realistic. This is a trick that Rivette is very good at. In fact this is his form of surrealism that he started to develop at the seventies with "Out 1" and "Celine And Julie Go Boating". Achieving this thing by telling about mysteries and shooting his movies with the documentary style pioneered by the Nouvelle Vague and by the director his self he combines the best of Bunuel and Rohmer. Rivette has a fascination with several things: Paris, theater, conspiracies and young women. In this work he tells us a story about three young women in Paris, each of whom looking for herself. Two of these women solve a big mystery at by trying to put their lives in order, while the third one is the typical for Rivette's movies female outsider. Rivette chooses summer to show us Paris with it's wonderful locations and so parks, cafés and small quiet streets are the tool for him to give to the movie an atmosphere of the film, which is colorful and joyful. This atmosphere is achieved also by the fact that almost all of the characters are young and by the several love stories that are told among everything else. One of the most beautiful movies ever.
Review of Up, Down, Fragile
