L’Une chante, l’autre pas (1977) - film review

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.

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

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