Word: varda
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LION'S LOVE. Director Agnes Varda has some fun with this overlong, weird comedy. There is no plot and a lot of talk as Viva (superstar). James Rado and Gerome Ragni (co-authors of Hair ), and Shirley Clarke (underground filmmaker) gather in a Beverly Hills hacienda the weekend Robert Kennedy was shot...
...some manufacturers make washing machines-with planned obsolescence. Only a few years after their release, Godard films become museum pieces. His innovations are adopted by other film makers, who (like Haskell Wexler in the kinetic Medium Cool) either put his techniques to better dramatic use or (like Agnes Varda in the festival's ludicrous Lions Love) sink beneath the weight of aimless stylistic decoration. Le Go/ Savoir features Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto sitting around a TV studio engaging in a lot of Mickey Mouse debate about linguistics and mouthing doses of Godard's peculiar...
...were to steal from any filmmaker, Downey would take from Preston Sturges, the American director whose Sullivan's Travels and Hail, the Conquering Hero are full of the kind of zaniness that abounds in Swope . Other favorite movies of Downey's are Varda's Le Bouheur, Losey's Servant, Titicut Follies, Citizen Kane, the Marx Brothers/Sam Wood's Night at the Opera, Kazan's On the Waterfront, Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes, and Truffaut's Jules...
This kind of film is very hard to pull off, since a few moments of excess and we are trapped in an atmosphere as pretentious as the one being chide. Thankfully, Agnes Varda's style is clear and elegant, perfect for the balance necessary to make Les Creatures work. Her frames are clear and simple and her cutting so clean that the most outlandish of sequences (an indescribable interrupted eating scene) seems logical...
Nevertheless, there are value judgements in this film. Agnes Varda is for love, good, and light, ambivalent about game playing, and against cynicism. Above all, I think, she believes in the ultimate endurance of live within the human spirit as a redeeming value, a force which transcends isolated relationships and permits us to continue to live...