How to setfacl on a directory and all its parents?

Let's say we have the following directory structure

a
  b1
    c1
    c2
  b2
    c3
    c4

And I want to use setfacl to give a user frank access to c1, I can do something like

-m u:frank:rX a/b1/c1

However this doesn't give him access to a and b1 automatically. The -R option does solve this because it applies the ACL to c1's children if there is any.