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.