Word: varda
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SOMETIMES DURING the course of Agnes Varda's Les Creatures, the hero and villain of the piece sit down beside a series of television screens and begin to play and odd sort of futuristic chess. The game's pieces represent characters in the village of the film. When two of them meet on the chess board, they meet in real life and are observed on the television screens. The villain has at his disposal a trap which, when it hovers over any one of the characters, permits him to play havoc with that character's emotions...
...have found yourself puzzling over the probable significance of the game described above you have already fallen into one of them. Les Creatures is a film of instant significances, a jumble of insane metaphors. Anyone who takes it at face value would necessarily conclude that Mlle Varda is a woman so obsessed with making a profound statement that she is incapable of anything beyond pretentious babbling...
...whole thing becomes absurd, of course, and that's just the point. More than any other director alive, Agnes Varda delights in giving an audience her euphoric joy in movie-making. Setting up all these apparent symbols is her slightly less than gentle way of chiding audience for their hyper-serious attitude upon entering the moviehouse...
...LEAST a third of the Orson Welles' series is the work of New Wave directors (Godard, Varda) or people close to them. Perhaps a third more comes from younger Europeans whose dramatic and visual experiments are still more drastic. In all of them the director designed his film form the beginning to end, which makes watching them a grand revelation. To figure out films designed as a unity gives you a new ability to look for meaning in their dramatic construction and visual style, instead of relying entirely on the dialogue and actors' expressions. The variety of dramatic forms...
Moviegoers who have seen Jacques Demy's The Model Shop may also be curious about a picture by his wife, who is a director too. She is known professionally as Agnès Varda, and at first glance her work and her husband's seem totally different. While he conjures up pastel never-never lands, she broods over such weighty matters as morality, predestination and the nature of reality. But husband and wife do have in com-BOULAT mon two uncommon traits: the ability to reduce everything to playground platitudes and a stylistic pomposity that serves only...