A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Up Down Fragile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Up Down Fragile. Show all posts

Monday, April 28, 2025

Up, Down, Fragile (Jacques Rivette, 1995)

Marianne Denicourt and Bruno Todeschini in Up, Down, Fragile

Cast: Marianne Denicourt, Nathalie Richard, Laurence Côte, André Marcon, Bruno Todeschini, Wilfred Benaïche, Enzo Enzo, Anna Karina, Stéphanie Schwartzbrod, Christine Vézinet, László Szabó (voice). Screenplay: Marianne Denicourt, Nathalie Richard, Laurence Côte, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette. Cinematography: Christophe Pollock. Production design: Emmanuel de Chauvigny. Film editing: Nicole Lubtchansky. Music: François Bréant. 

Jacques Rivette's Up, Down, Fragile is a dawdling, self-indulgent film for cinéastes with a lot of time on their hands. It intrigued me for about an hour, but then my patience with Rivette's send-up of movie tropes and genres began to wear thin. 


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