Monthly Archives: October 2017

  • One Sings, the Other Doesn’t

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’une chante, l’autre pas

    Agnès Varda  (1977)

    Agnès Varda illustrates the changing circumstances and growth of political consciousness of women in France between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s.  She does so by focusing on two friends, Pauline aka Pomme (Valérie Mairesse) and Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard).  As a teenager in Paris in 1962, Pomme is increasingly suffocated by the bourgeois values of her parents.  A decisive rift occurs when she lies to them to get money to help Suzanne, with whom she’s recently renewed acquaintance, pay for an abortion.  A former neighbour who moved out under a cloud when she first became pregnant, Suzanne now has two young children with a local photographer, Jérôme (Robert Dadiès).  She can’t support a third child.  With Pomme’s help, she goes to Switzerland to get her abortion since she can’t have one legally in France.  Jérôme then commits suicide.  Suzanne, brought up in the country, returns, with her son and daughter, to live on her parents’ small farm.   Pomme abandons her baccalauréat studies, leaves home and becomes a singer.  The two young women – Suzanne is the elder by several years – lose touch but meet up again in 1972 at a women’s rights demonstration in Bobigny, a Paris suburb, where Pomme’s feminist combo is performing and Suzanne is in the crowd.   In the intervening decade, Pomme too has had an abortion, in Amsterdam:  it’s there that she met her current boyfriend, an Iranian called Darius (Ali Rafie).  Suzanne meanwhile has gained secretarial qualifications the hard way:  the opposition of her benighted parents forced her to teach herself to type in a cowshed.  She’s now running a family planning outfit in Hyères (a long way from Paris).  Pomme and Suzanne again go their separate ways but start to correspond by postcard.

    This (about an hour’s worth) is as far as I got with One Sings, the Other Doesn’t[1].  BFI publicity importantly announced the ‘fortieth anniversary screening’ of the film.  Its cachet is thanks to a combination of Agnès Varda’s standing and longevity, and to her subject – not at all to what Varda actually put on the screen.  There’s a shocking discrepancy between the important changes in women’s personal and professional lives that the feminist movement catalysed in western democracies during the period Varda covers, and her jejune treatment of the terrain.  It was no surprise to read afterwards that plenty of feminists gave the film a hard time when it first appeared.  Varda defended herself then by saying, inter alia, that ‘I don’t agree that a feminist film must put men down’.  She was right but making the male characters as drippy as she does here – and, worse, the female protagonists scarcely more interesting – seems a poor solution.  Varda narrates the story in voiceover (unless she cuts this down in the second half there’s far too much of it).  There’s no arguing with the accuracy of her title; the Other is easier than One to tolerate purely because she doesn’t sing.  Both lead actresses lack variety but Suzanne, a mournful Madonna, is relatively inoffensive.  Perky Pomme is at her worst delivering her sub-chansons, with banal lyrics by Varda.   Watching One Sings, the Other Doesn’t reminded me, oddly enough, of another 1977 film, Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point.   Varda tries to make feminism accessible and appealing rather in the way that Ross was at pains to make classical ballet American family-friendly.  At least The Turning Point is moderately entertaining.

    2 October 2017

    [1] Hard  to say whether this was again a total running time issue.  One Sings, the Other Doesn’t was advertised as 107 minutes.  In another otherwise superfluous introduction, a BFI person informed the audience, as an afterthought, that the film was fifty minutes longer than advertised.  That’s what I heard anyway, though in retrospect I think she must have said fifteen (Wikipedia indicates 116 minutes and IMDB two hours).  Once it was clear what the film was like, the prospect of 157 minutes of it was daunting.

  • My Journey through French Cinema

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Voyage à travers le cinéma français 

    Bertrand Tavernier with Thierry Frémaux (2016)

    As noted before, if I fail to see a film out the reason is less likely to be outright loathing of what I’m watching than how much longer the movie is set to go on.  That’s certainly why I walked out of Bertrand Tavernier’s My Journey through French Cinema.  If the total running time had been two hours I’d have managed it comfortably.  There was still two hours to go when I abandoned the journey, after some eighty minutes.  I’m a bit ashamed of this failure and sure that, had I stayed, I’d have enjoyed plenty more of the film clips that Tavernier and Thierry Frémaux, who gets a share of the directing credit, have assembled.  Yet I wasn’t getting enough from this documentary to make staying the course worthwhile.

    The opening suggests, as does the (English) title of the piece, a personal odyssey.  Tavernier recalls witnessing, as a three-year-old boy, the liberation of his native city of Lyon in 1944; his early visits to the cinema; the expanding sense of hope and light that both experiences evoked.   He remembers childhood time spent in a sanatorium and the especially strong impression made on him there by a film he identified many years later as Jacques Becker’s Dernier atout (1942).  From there, Tavernier moves into admiring commentary on Becker’s cinema more generally, with plenty of illustrative clips.  So far, so pleasantly discursive and informative:  then Tavernier embarks on a fresh commentary, on Jean Renoir, followed by Jean Gabin, followed by Marcel Carné.  By now, the opening has given way to a less distinctive, insiderish narrative.   The movie excerpts are complemented not only by snatches of black-and-white archive film interviews with the likes of Jean Gabin but also by Tavernier’s recollections of what Gabin (and others) said to him in conversation.  These disclosures are a kind of superior gossip rather than illuminating.   There’s no indication of how these other famous names influenced Tavernier in his film-making career.

    Watching My Journey, I had an increasing sense that, in order to appreciate it, I needed to know either much more or much less than I do about French cinema – or perhaps more about the Tavernier oeuvre.  (He’s directed more than twenty features, beginning with The Clockmaker of St Paul, in the course of the last forty years.  I’m afraid I’ve seen none of them.)   For example, if you’re familiar with all the Jacques Becker films included in Tavernier’s selection, you can perhaps perceive connections between them that eluded me.  If you understand the technical terminology of movie-making, you’ll be able to follow easily what Tavernier says about the technique of Becker and Renoir.  On the other hand, if you’re such a newcomer to classic French cinema that you’ve never seen Jean Gabin before, you’ll very likely be impressed enough from Tavernier’s clips to want to see Gabin’s full performances in Pépé le Moko, La grande illusion, Le jour se lève and so on.  The clips whetted my appetite to see these films again and to seek out more of Gabin; the same reaction followed brief samples of the work of Pierre Brasseur, Simone Signoret, Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo.  But this served as a reminder of what I already knew I should be doing.  It wasn’t a revelation.

    28 September 2017

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