Uma Canta, a Outra Não

Without being accused of gratuitous nastiness (as rightly prohibited in the IMDb guidelines), can I just say how disappointing, to the point of hostility, I found this film, especially as I think its director's brilliant early work is in desperate need of re-evaluation. This film has none of her virtues - the mix of spontaneity with supreme formal control; the contrast between the privileging of heroine's subjectivity and ironic objectivity.

Instead, this is a formless, rambling picaresque, using two female friends to chart feminism throughout the 60s and 70s. Many of the film's arguments seem to me anti-feminist; the songs are largely sub-Joan Baez and intolerable; the lack of any ironic intelligence countering the optimism and platitudes is patronising; and I still can't believe the rather tactless Eurovision-style song about abortion.

The highly acclaimed French filmmaker Agnes Varda, who recently passed at the age of 90, wrote and directed this sweeping saga. It centers on the friendship of Pauline (Valerie Mairesse) and Suzanne (Therese Liotard) over the course of two decades the 1960's and 70's.

The two women will occasionally meet over the years but a lot of their communication will be by postcard. They're both active feminists and willing to help other women with pregnancies and actions to take against what they consider to be oppressive abortion laws, giving the film relevance in today's times.

Overall, I just found this movie to be bristling with vitality, but presented in a low-key style, as the two women grapple with relationships, families, and life itself. The acting by Mairesse and Liotard, and the supporting cast, is natural and their characters believable, in my opinion. For those viewers that enjoy sweeping foreign films there's a lot to like here.

A lot of times when a story is told, a filmmaker has to figure out how to frame the principal characters. And if it's a story being told over many years, like for the characters in One Sings, the Other Doesn't, the director needs to know how to take the time out to show... time and how it unfolds. What makes this film so special is that Agnes Varda has such a love for human beings across the board here - even, perhaps against her better judgment, the supporting men like Jerome (the baby daddy of Suzanne's kids, who we mostly see early in the film), or Darius (Pauline's Iranian lover) - that the plotlessness is more than fine. She has an innate confidence that we can follow these women and their lives because they're just that interesting.

My first instinct was to compare it to Boyhood, as far as showing lives being lived and change happening not due to one distinct thing but through a series of moments and things making change seem imperceptible. But this really has more of a novelistic take on Suzanne and Pauline, the details of how they behave and see each other and free will (a very important beat for Pauline early on - she brings it up to her teacher outside of class before asking if she knows anyone who does abortions for her friend Suzanne), and then what are commonly called "women's rights" like pro-choice and just being able to work and *Be* women. Of course for Varda, as it should be for rational thinking people, these aren't "women's" issues but basic human rights.

I should mention here I had a not worry but question going into this: were the "issues" that were mentioned in the synopsis, about how there's abortion being a big deal for Suzanne early in the story, and then how Suzanne works for a women's health center (i.e. for reproductive reasons, at the time France didn't have legality for abortion), and then especially how Pauline finds her calling as a singer and, most importantly, as one who finds her voice as an artist singing about being a woman and with her hippie-ish group of women singers and musicians. Were the issues going to overwhelm the narrative?

I shouldn't have fretted; Varda certainly has fun staging these very loose musical sequences (one might try to dub this a musical, but something like Nashville then is more of a musical than this, where characters in a grounded reality sing their songs within the story - here it... kind of blends that line, but just barely), but while her leads are proud feminists that's not what *has to* define them. In a way this sticks back to the free will scene earlier on, albeit for Suzanne, as we see in her flashbacks when Varda flashes from 1962 to 72 that she had to work her way up to becoming part of the women's health center (lots of typing, even in, darn, the barn): Suzanne and Pauline in each of their ways practice free will, and it can't help but be tied to political and social concerns (not "issues" either, that labels it too simplistically). And really if we don't like these people, why should we stick through it amid the social commentary?

This is a surprisingly ambitious movie in some ways; Varda's film goes from France - cities and rural parts - to Amsterdam to Iran and then back to France rural parts again, and when she cuts suddenly from a conversation bit between Pauline and Darius to Iran there just has to be a narration reminding us how postcard-like this image she cuts to is. 'One Sings' has something like, I don't know and lost count, about 400 scenes it seems like, some of them quite short, and a lot of time narration from Suzanne and Pauline (reading their letters as they are most often pen pals), and Varda herself as the sort of God of this story (as well she is!)

The one mark I could make against it is that it starts to go/feel a little long near the end, and yet at the same time I felt that impulse or criticism or observation and fought against it in the theater watching this; I wanted to be with these women longer - Varda's chronology makes it where the story could end in any number of spots (once we understand what Pauline's seemingly instinctual/maternal plan is with Darius, a kinda-sorta-not-quite separation where he gets a kid and then he knocks her up so she can have another in respective countries, that last third or so seems set as a loose story with something to look forward to if not an end), and yet it's such a warm and generous kind of storytelling all through this.

Sometimes a filmmaker feels like he or she (usually he) is directing a story to a specific place and we can intuit where it might be headed - it doesn't make it any less entertaining or engaging, but the formula is part of the pact we make with the film. Varda, to equate it to painting, has all of these little strokes she's doing, and at first it doesn't seem like it will amount up to much, and yet this gradualness brought me closer to Suzanne and Pauline (and, as well, the performances, Mairesse especially, got deeper and more tremendously felt as it went on), and the sense of play is wrapped up in a unique presentation: it's drama, but we aren't made to ask "What does this scene have to be ABOUT?" all the time; it's documentary, but then dialog is breaking it up; it's musical, but for a long stretch it isn't. It's the cinematic equivalent of a river-boat journey through 15 years of... life, and for women specifically, that can't be tossed aside.

Sidney Lumet's "the group"(from Mary McCarthy) was,in its own special way,some kind of woman's lib manifesto.Here the group is a two-person team but we see them live during a pretty long time,from 1962 to the mid-seventies.It's interesting to notice that abortion was legal in France only in 1975,thanks to minister Simone Veil.

Agnès Varda's last feature film was "les creatures" a work for highbrows."L'une chante,l'autre pas" is a return to an accessible ,more palatable style.All things woman's lib indeed.Of the two characters ,Suzanne,played by beautiful Thérèse Liotard,is by far the most endearing:her path ran into difficulties,even tragedies:her lover's suicide,her parents' despise who treated her like a dog,her affair with a married man...Pomme is a singer who wants to be free,but she acts like a bubblehead girl:marrying an Iranian,were he the most liberal of them all, is not perhaps the right move..

A lot of this stuff has not worn well:the second part recalls hippies communities,and chic ones at that.The epilogue might be a nod to "le bonheur" her 1964 movie,which was nevertheless disputable in several respects.

Agnès Varda regained the audience's favor in the eighties with "sans toit ni loi" and her superb love movie for her husband Jacques Demy "Jacquot de Nantes".

A lovely tale of feminism, friendship, and finding oneself, told over a couple of decades. The film is full of challenges to the patriarchy - standing up to one's father, questioning the institution of marriage, having the right to get an abortion, and not automatically submitting to the will of men, either to assume a traditional domestic role or to have sex. Yet at the same time, it's never shrill. The heroes of this film are in loving relationships, deal with life as it comes, and calmly assert their rights. There is a hippy vibe to the film with lots of feminist songs, adding to its gentle spirit. Passing down the feminism to the next generation was a wonderful touch at the end as well. Beautiful work from Agnès Varda.