L'opéra-mouffe

L'opéra-mouffe (original title) was shown in the U.S. as Diary of a Pregnant Woman (1958). The filmmaker Agnès Varda directed this homage to Rue Mouffetard, in Paris' 5th Arrondissement.

I think the original French title works better for this movie. It's true that the neighborhood is seen through the eyes of a pregnant woman, but I think the intent of the film is to give us a feeling for the everyday life in this non-prepossessing neighborhood in Paris.

Varda uses her usual technique of casually showing us the people and events in the neighborhood, and letting us draw our own conclusions. Nothing dramatic happens during the short (16 minute) film. However, at the end, I felt that I had learned something about the way that neighborhood looked and sounded at that time.

We saw this film on the large screen at the excellent Dryden Theatre of the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. It was part of an Agnès Varda retrospective sponsored by the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Eastman Museum. It will work well on the small screen.

A bit overshadowed by the works of male filmmakers of the late 1950s and early Sixties in France –as Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut and Resnais-, that helped to found the "nouvelle vague", Varda is nevertheless known as the "grandmother" of this film movement, with her praised first feature "La Pointe-Courte" (1956) and this beautiful short made in Paris while she was pregnant, a homage to the Mouffetard street in Paris and its people, to love, life and old age, which she defined as "neighborhood cinéma." A fresh and free-form exercise of images, songs and inter-titles, it confirmed the promise of a talented and innovative director, who went on to make more remarkable films as "Cléo de 5 à 7" (1961), "Sans toit ni loi" (1985), and, at 72, "Les glaneurs et la glaneuse."

The movie is a feast for the eyes, we stroll through a French town from the perspective of a pregnant woman. It would be interesting to know whether Agnes Varda, the director, was herself pregnant during the shooting or editing of this movie. The images flow in groups of different types, for example, there are set of images organized by the shape of the images, there are sets organized by similar movement, there are sets organized by meaning. It is all very hypnotic. There is also a surprising amount of nudity for the year of its production. As far as my experience goes, it has more nudity than any movie before it and any movie after it until 1966's "I am Curious-Yellow". This movie reminds me of the experiments made during the early days of the movie camera and also the early avant-garde movies of France and Russia. It's well done, but it doesn't offer much beyond what those earlier movies achieved.

Also the original soundtrack is a unique and interesting counterpoint.

Agnes Varda made this little movie in 1958. According to herself, the reason was that the winter was very cold and she was worried about the homeless people. So she went to L'mouffe Street with her camera and started to shoot.

This film about ordinary people; alcoholics, drunks, people selling groceries and flowers, people who buys groceries and flowers, lovers and others. Maybe they dont look to good, but this is how people look. A nice little film with a very french touch.