Having seen and enjoyed two other films directed by Agnés Varda, I grabbed this out of the stacks of the film collection at our University library, anticipating another excellent experience. Instead, I've landed myself on the horns of a dilemma. I want to follow through on reviewing this film, partly because there are no other reviews for it here at Epinions, but I'm feeling distinctly unqualified to write the review. I genuinely hope that they'll someday be additional reviews for this film from those more able to guide your decisions in relation to it. This is a feminist film through and through. In my judgment, there are some "feminist issues" that both women or men can react to and learn from in pretty much the same way, but the issues addressed in this film are not of that kind. This is a film written and directed by a woman, about women, and for women. As a male reviewer, I can perhaps make some judgments about this film as cinema, but I can't really directly judge how deeply women will or will not be moved by the thematic issues raised.

Historical Background: Agnés Varda was born in Brussels, Belgium on May 30th, 1928. Her parents were Greek and French respectively. The family moved to France early in Varda's life. She studied at the Sorbonne and later at the Ecôle du Louvre, planning for a career as a museum curator. Instead, she took a job as the official photographer of the Théâtre National Populaire. That exposure to theater awakened a latent interest, which then led ultimately to filmmaking. Varda had seen only a few films before making her own first one, La Pointe courte (1954). After three more short films, she established her reputation as a filmmaker with the intelligent and entertaining Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), which I personally enjoyed very much. During the next fifteen years, she made almost exclusively shorts and film essays, some in America, with the exception of two worthy features, La Bonheur (1965), an ironic study of happiness, and Les Créatures (1966).

The present film, One Sings; the Other Doesn't, was made in 1977. Varda then waited eight years before returning to filmmaking, winning international acclaim with Vagabond (1985). Varda was married to director Jacques Demy (1931-1990) (Lola (1961) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)) and has helped with the restoration of several of his films. She also filmed a beautiful love story, Jacquot de Nantes (1991), as a tribute to her late husband.

When Varda began making films, she was essentially invading an all-male domain. Later, however, and with One Sings, the Other Doesn't in particular, Varda abandoned, in a sense, the demand for gender integration in filmmaking in favor of a more clearly separate-but-equal feminist approach. Instead of a film for a general audience incidentally directed by a woman, this one would be a film by a woman, about women, for women. It's not that the film is anti-male in any sense; only that the men in the film are largely peripheral and incidental to the lives of the women.

The Story: The movie follows the friendship of two women over a period of about fifteen years, from 1962 to 1976. Both women are at a stage of life where they are searching for direction and purpose. In Paris in 1962, Pauline (Valerie Mairesse) is a seventeen-year-old, living at home with her parents and attending high school. She wants to be a singer. She wanders into a photographer's shop, drawn in by his interesting portraits of women, mostly depicted as earthy, soulful, and a bit weary. The photographer, Jérôme (Robert Dadiès), explains, "I just wait for them to get tired of posing. Then, they let go and they're just there." Pauline calls the photo-portraits "beautiful but annoying." Pauline is interested in one portrait in particular, since the woman is a former neighbor, Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard), whom Pauline would like to find again. Oddly enough, it turns out that Suzanne is Jérôme's live-in girlfriend, despite the fact he's married to a woman who will not divorce him. Jérôme and Suzanne have two children, three-year-old Marie and a baby named Matthew. So, Pauline finds her old acquaintance and they strike up a friendship. Suzanne is five years older than her young friend.

Though Jérôme is a kindly man and a loving father, he is not making much of a living from his photography. He can't support the family that he has and Suzanne is pregnant again. Pauline takes it upon herself to help Suzanne out. She extracts forty francs from her father with a lie about a trip that the choir is supposedly taking. Then she offers to watch Suzanne's children while she travels to Switzerland for an abortion. (Abortions were illegal in France until 1975.) Suzanne returns but in somewhat shaky condition. Pauline, in the meantime, quits school and joins a musical group, initially as doo-wah accompaniment for a male vocalist. One day, Suzanne and Pauline together discover that the despondent Jérôme has hung himself in his darkroom.

Suzanne has no job skills or prospects and has no choice but to return to her parents' farm in Hyeres, in southern France. They treat her badly, feeling that she's betrayed their Catholic morals. One example that stands out is when Suzanne's mother says, "Dinners ready. Call your bastards!" Nevertheless, the children prosper in the country under their mother's guidance and grow strong and able. Pauline, still in Paris, forms a feminist troubadour group and performs under the name "Apple." Apple writes the groups "consciousness-raising" song repertoire. Typical lyrics include "My body is mine" and "I am woman, I am me." Suzanne and Apple continue to think about one another, though they've lost contact. They reconnect in 1972 when both attend the same protest rally at the trial of a fifteen-year-old girl who got an abortion. The girl is acquitted, setting the stage for further progressive changes. Suzanne has to return to the south, but the pair exchange addresses and begin a postcard correspondence that continues for the rest of the film. Many of the postcards are "read" over the course of the film by a voiceover narrator.

The next few years prove crucial for both women. Suzanne teachers herself to type, gets a job in a factory, then as a medical secretary, and finally, as a counselor in a family planning center. She has a brief affair with a sailor but refuses another with a married pediatrician, Pierre (Jean-Pierre Pellegrin). She's sworn off married men, recalling what happened to Jérôme. Pierre obliges by divorcing his wife and he and Suzanne are later married. Suzanne's daughter, Marie (Dominique Ducros), progresses smoothly into adolescence, nicely buoyed, we're to believe, by her mother's feminist orientation.

For her part, Apple meets Mr. Right in the form of Darius (Ali Raffi), an Iranian student and, later, economist. When her latest musical enterprise falls apart just as Darius has to return to Iran, she impulsively goes with him. In Iran, the pair marries. Apple is soon pregnant but is also getting increasingly uncomfortable with the highly Chauvinistic Iranian society. She decides to return to France to have her baby and declares her intent never to return to Iran. Darius joins her in France for the baby's delivery, but it's clear that their days of living together are almost over. The pair strikes an odd bargain. Darius will be permitted to take their son to Iran and raise him there provided that he impregnate Apple again and allow her to keep the second child! The film concludes on an idyllic note, with Suzanne, Apple, and their respective circles of significant others having gathered together for the holiday season in the new home of Suzanne and Pierre. Both Suzanne and Pauline, it would seem, have achieved a degree of liberation from the shackles that bound them as young women.

Themes: When women's issues come up for discussion in daily living or at the University where I work, I make a point of taking a backseat on such matters to any female participants. It's not a question of disinterest; quite the contrary. It's simply that I feel that people with the most experience and/or the most at stake for any issue should be allowed the majority of the floor time to express their views. This being a solo movie review, however, I'm obliged to set out my views on the themes of the film, despite my limited claim of a right to do so.

I have a problem with one aspect of the film. The arrangement worked out by Suzanne and Pierre to split the litter, so to speak, is inconsistent with my values in relation to childrearing. The arrangement was designed to satisfy the respective needs of the two parents without regard to the needs of the two children. One will now grow up without a mother, the other without a father, and both without their sibling. I deplore the idea that children exist to satisfy the needs of their parents rather than the other way around. Varda seems at pains to indicate that Marie and Matthew turned out just fine being raised by a single mom, and certainly that can be the case. I was myself a single Dad for about eight years at one stage in my life and would like to believe that I did well by my eldest daughter. On average, however, two parents serve the needs of children better than one. More broadly, the film taken as a whole and Suzanne's songs in particular are suggestive of women who are largely self-absorbed. Certainly, there are times in life when any person, regardless of gender, needs to be focused on his or her own welfare, preparation, and development, but successful childrearing hinges in part on turning a significant part of one's focus toward other beings.

Production Values: There is little conventional plot for this film. It's more an illustrated feminist essay than a conventional narrative. One problem with the film, therefore, is a lack of plot, drama, or action. We get paintings of people and places and voiceover narrative, but relatively little interesting dialog or activities. Another problem is that the film skips from one point to another in the women's lives, showing their slow steady progress toward liberation, but without providing any basis for how those steps were achieved. The various growth spurts are only reported, not illuminated. The film has the same general flavor as Apple's songs, touting the wonders of women's liberation, as though at a pep rally, rather than providing insight into why and how women might grow as individuals.

Visually, the film is pleasing. Varda's training as a photographer is always evident in her films. The two female leads are attractive women, not glamorous, but with evident outer and inner beauty. The camera depicts these young women from a women's perspective. One can see a subtle difference in the nude and seminude shots of women of this film versus most others. Varda takes a respectful view toward the bodies of women in contrast to the more titillating depictions of women designed to be erotic for male viewers.

Valérie Mairesse, with reddish blond hair, did an excellent job giving her character, Pauline/Apple, a robust sense of direction and self-worth. She was the one who sings and the performance numbers were pretty decent, though nothing special. Mairesse also appeared in The Sacrifice (1986). Thérèse Liotard, slender and dark-haired, was even better, in my opinion, providing a more complex personality for her character. She suffered, endured, struggled and, finally, overcame. Liotard's other work has included Death Watch (1980) and The Disenchanted (1990).

Bottom-Line: I can't recommend this film on the basis of cinematic entertainment. It's not terrible, as such, but just not very engaging. I suspect that it could have special value as a discussion piece for a woman's group or women's studies program or as a consciousness-raising influence for an individual female viewer. I think that someone who has lived life for a few decades or more as a woman would need to speak to that question. I'm going to rate this film at 2-stars for general entertainment value, acknowledging that it might be a good deal better than that as fodder for discussions among feminists.

Recommended:
No

Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age