One Sings, The Other Doesn’t

Part of Varda: A Retrospective

Agnès Varda’s feminist anthem, perhaps her most political film, is both a buoyant chronicle of a transformative friendship and an empowering vision of sisterhood. When teenage Pauline (Valérie Mairesse) helps Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard)—a struggling mother of two—procure the money for an abortion, a deep bond forms. The two remain powerfully linked over the course of more than a decade as each searches for her place in the world—a world that, in Varda’s imaginative presentation, includes blissed-out bohemian musical numbers and an Iranian adventure. Varda, on the frontlines of France’s abortion rights movement, was always a feminist, saying “I did all that—my photos, my craft, my film, my life—on my terms, my own terms, and not to do it like a man.” This intimate epic is a celebration of the power of women to lift each other up.

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