Up, Down, Fragile

Books and maps, libraries and librarians are sprinkled across Rivette’s oeuvre. Perhaps it’s something about their possibilities as stories and sequiturs, secrets and puzzles: detectives and magicians searching for clues and games in a world at once familiar and mysterious.

In Rivette’s only musical—inspired by the low-budget MGM musicals of the 50s—three women are adrift in a Parisian summer. The title words can be found on some of the parcels one of the women delivers around the city; they could also describe a quality in each of three women—bourgeois Louise (Denicourt) has just come out of a years-long coma and into an inheritance, street-smart Ninon (Richard) escapes her criminal ex-boyfriend and starts work as a motorbike (and sometimes rollerblade) courier, and sensitive Ida (Côte) is a librarian in search of her birth mother.