Word: varda
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...Varda, who narrates the story, tell us that the letters never materialize. A few thin lines dashed across the backs of picture postcards take their place. For the rest of the film, then, Varda allows herself to jump back and forth in time, from Suzanne to Pomme to Suzanne again, making the transitions through shots of a map or a postage stamp. Such a device is really only a flimsy coverup, justifying the connection of two largely unrelated stories. The film fails dramatically because no working relationship is even established between the two women; their friendship, like the solutions...
Then the bubble bursts. Pomme's husband becomes possessive and she is torn, wanting her baby and wanting her freedom. For a moment it seems Varda might be getting down to serious business, facing up to a problem common to contemporary women. But within the moment we return to storyland. Pomme proposes a solution to her husband: "Give me another child, that way we'll each have one." Such an extraordinary proposition is not out of place in this whimsical context of child-mothers and doll-babies. It is a viable solution in Varda's guilt-free world...
...meets a pediatrician and gets married (which does not necessarily mean copping out if the man is as colorless and undefined as this doctor is). When the film ends it is 1976 and Pomme and Suzanne are together again, completely fulfilled by their extended families, guitars and old photographs. Varda concludes her makeshift friendship by telling us, "They were alike; they had fought to gain the happiness of being a woman...
POMME AND SUZANNE are supposed to symbolize the new consciousness. They are, presumably, free to make their own choices about their minds and bodies. Varda tells us over and over again that this is so; she makes clear her intent in transitional narrative scenes throughout the film. Yet the characters themselves never make this felt. They know their own bodies, but not their own minds; their speech is no more than a succession of feminist slogans. Pomme childishly believes that she is redefining her position within society by abandoning her responsibilities and singing the praises of pregnancy in the streets...
Suzanne, tired of suffering and loneliness, cops out and fulfills the stereotypical mother's dream for her daughter in her marriage to an established doctor. Varda justifies the wedding by saying it was without bourgeois frills; for entertainment they played records and scrabble. Nevertheless, this marriage is disturbing, as are all of Varda's male-female relationships. There is no redifinition of a women's role in relation to a man here. If a man is dominant and aggressive the woman simply leaves him. If he is weak and easily patronized the women can stay. There are no struggles...