Rivette, relating and connecting

I recently watched a strange and wonderful musical by Jacques Rivette. Rivette is immensely interested in how people relate and connect. Up Down Fragile follows the stories of three young women in Paris in the mid 90s. It's a fair while before there are any songs and dances but it's worth the wait. Singing and dancing are ways of relating and connecting. This sequence is so fresh and on the spot![embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drZYdgA2qTM[/embed]Or with subtitles, and slightly blurred:[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruo-7umPTFc[/embed]Psychoanalysis has a lot to say about relationships, mostly based on an assumption that human beings are fundamentally and permanently at odds with the world. When it comes to what is outside us, hatred or some sort of takeover are the order of the day. Relating takes place from a more or less well-defended fortress. This sequence with Nathalie Richard (Ninon) and Marianne Denicourt (Louise) offers a glimpse of another way of relating.Ninon is a delivery girl. She shows up at Louise's house to deliver some flowers. She also has a bit of information. But even before they start singing and dancing their dialogue shifts away from a naturalistic notion of delivery or exchange into another way of speaking. My spoken French isn't great but it's impossible not to hear the rhymes starting up as they talk. The audible correspondences in the women's speech are accompanied by the reciprocal rustlings of their cellophane-wrapped bouquets. These are twirled, flourished, held and dropped, not in unison, not symmetrically, but in a distractingly harmonious rapport.There's been a plot revelation -- Ninon lets Louise know that the guy who's been following her isn't a suitor but has been hired by her father to keep an eye on her. This is significant but it isn't the main event. Across the narratives of desire: what does the guy want? what does Louise want? what does her father want? plays a lighter, more expansive notion of what matters, what's worth talking about, what talking is about, and what relationship can be.

Therapeutic relating: 'The obscure friendship of rhyme'

There's a remarkable description of this kind of effect in Derrida's book on friendship. He writes about relationships within language, what he calls ‘the obscure friendship of rhyme: alliance, harmony, assonance, chime, the insane linking of a couple. Sense is born in a pair, once, randomly and predestined.'The rhyming in the Rivette sequence, like the dancing that follows on from it, feels pretty loose and improvisational, at times even a little crazy. But the references to the ozone layer, Caravaggio and Mallarmé suggest an advanced awareness of subtle connections and correspondences, whether these exist in the atmosphere, inside the frames of paintings, or on the spaced pages of a poem. The relaxed finesse of the choreography and camera-work shows a practical and formal interest in correspondences, connections and relationality.The sequence shows a joyous type of movement that isn't moving in on anyone or anything. It has another, freer way of making sense and organising life. 'Parlons d'autre choses,' the women sing. 'Let's speak of something else.'