L'Une chante, l'autre pas
1977 Drama
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Credits
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Summary
Paris, 1962. Pauline is a seventeen year old girl whose main preoccupation is singing
in the school choir. One day, she meets a photographer, Jérôme, whose
girlfriend Suzanne is pregnant with his third child. Barely 22, Suzanne cannot support
another child and accepts money from Pauline to arrange an illegal abortion. Ten
years later, the two women meet up at a women’s lib demonstration. These days, Pauline
is a member of a group of travelling singers, whilst Suzanne has a job with a family planning
clinic. Despite their separation, the two women keep in touch and pursue their individual
search for freedom and happiness.
Review
Agnès Varda’s sunny portrait of female friendship is very nearly a documentary
of the rise and ultimate success of feminism in France in the 1960s and 1970s. It
features two apparently disparate characters, one who rebels against her middle class
background and lives a free and easy life as an itinerant singer, the other who gradually
manages to liberate herself from the chains of her working class background to live the
values she holds dear. What both women have in common is the need to free themselves
from the societal view of their sex, where women are seen as home builders and creatures
whose primary raison’d’être was to have children and be subservient to male superiority.
The film records not just documented fact – the triumph of the women’s rights movement
in the early 1970s – but conveys the mood of the period, one of great optimism and release.
After not just decades but centuries of subjugation to male law, women finally had control
over their bodies and their lives; they could live as they wanted, not as society and
the law told them to. Varda’s free-flowing, unpretentious style of filmmaking is
perfectly aligned with her subject, and the result is one of her most genuine and charming
films.
© James Travers 2006 Write a review for this film... |
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