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

Saturday, August 22, 2020

Lions Love (...and Lies) (Agnès Varda, 1969)

James Rado, Viva, and Gerome Ragni in Lions Love (...and Lies)
Cast: Viva, James Rado, Gerome Ragni, Shirley Clarke, Carlos Clarens, Eddie Constantine, Max Laemmle, Steve Kenis, Hal Landers, Peter Bogdanovich, Billie Dixon, Richard Bright. Screenplay: Agnès Varda. Cinematography: Stevan Larner. Art direction: Jack Wright III. Film editing: Robert Dalva, Carolyn Hicks. Music: Joseph Byrd.

Things have been bad before. Maybe Agnès Varda's pseudo-documentary Lions Love (...and Lies) is just what we need to watch in this time of a rampaging pandemic and collapsing economy presided over by a corrupt and malignant narcissist, if only to remind us that things looked pretty grim in the late 1960s, with the Vietnam War seemingly unstoppable and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy casting a pall. We survived that, and we'll survive this. We can hope. Not that Lions Love starts out on a grim note. Instead, we find ourselves at a performance of Michael McClure's play The Beard, about an encounter between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, and then hanging out in a Hollywood mansion with one of Andy Warhol's entourage, Viva, and the creators of the musical Hair, James Rado and Gerome Ragni. Frivolity with an edge, you might say. But things darken with the arrival of filmmaker Shirley Clarke, playing herself as a New Yorker in La La Land, where she hopes to get studio backing for a film. She's not at all at home there, not in the hedonistic way of the aforementioned trio, who revel in the glitz of the setting. And then the calendar begins to remind us that this is 1968, the windup of Bobby Kennedy's campaign for the Democratic nomination in California, and the darkness deepens -- at least for the moment. To add to the chaos of Kennedy's assassination, Viva receives word that Warhol himself has been shot. Yet before long, the trio are back in their old hedonistic mode. Varda handles this tonally complex subject (I hesitate to call it a story) with all the irony it deserves, and even makes an on-screen appearance when Clarke rebels against the demands of Varda's script that she attempt suicide. It's a movie that only looks like a mess, because once it was over, I found myself sorting through my own memories of the period to try to bring order out of the chaos it portrays. Lions Love is history as tragicomedy.
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