Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/13/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

One Sings, the Other Doesn't (Agnès Varda, 1977)

One Sings, the Other Doesn't (Agnès Varda, 1977)

Cast: Thérèse Liotard, Valérie Mairesse, Robert Dadiès, Mona Mairesse, Francis Lemaire, Ali Rafie, Jean-Pierre Pellegrin, François Wertheimer. Screenplay: Agnès Varda. Cinematography: Charles Van Damme. Production design: Franckie Diago. Film editing: Joëlle Van Effenterre. Music: François Wertheimer.

Agnès Varda's feminist fable has not held up quite as well as it could have, though even when it was first released it got a derisive snort from Pauline Kael, to wit, "The sunshiny simplicity of the feminist movement celebrated here is so laughable that you can't hate the picture. You just feel that some of your brain cells have been knocked out." It's not quite as risible or as damaging as that, I think, but whenever Kael invokes the inclusive "you" in her judgments of movies I tend to resist. Taken as an evocation of a moment in the history of the women's movement it has some true significance. Its leads, the one who sings (Valérie Mairesse) and the other who doesn't (Thérèse Liotard), are skillful and charming, and the plights of the characters they play are real ones: marriages that go awry, unwanted pregnancy, anti-female laws, and unsupportive families. It's in the "sunshiny" resolution of these plights -- which are darkly presented -- that we may feel that Varda has pulled her punches, and I find a little of the film's music goes a long way -- unfortunately, there's a lot of it.