Les Creatures
This week we’re presenting Les Créatures (1966) on Wednesday, September 10th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the film at 7:10!
One more piece of business before I introduce the movie: we are definitely planning one more From Below BBQ for the summer, which is certainly scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, September 14th, just so you can get it sketched onto your calendar for 4 PM on. We’ll maybe even screen a movie very dear to my heart later that evening, to bid adieu to my 31st year of life. Here’s a partiful to RSVP, just so we can have an estimated headcount!
Les Créatures is not Agnès Varda’s most popular, or maybe even her best film, but it is criminally underrated and one of my personal favorites in her estimable filmography. We here at From Below headquarters have recently been talking about debut movies, which, I feel, can fall into two major categories: debuts that feel like training wheels, where the director is putting together the pieces of how to direct a movie from a logistical perspective, and fully-formed on arrival movies, where the director has managed to put basically everything on screen that will be of interest to them for the rest of their career. Not mutually exclusive, I know. Les Créatures is not a debut film, but in a similar act of overcategorization I would say that it’s one of the best examples of a ‘road not taken’ film in a director’s filmography, when they test the waters in a certain direction and then swerve (or overcorrect) in a different direction, perhaps towards the artistic lane that they were truly meant to be in. Les Créatures comes after Varda’s early career successes, Cléo from 5 to 7 and Le Bonheur, and is the first film she makes with big stars of European cinema, namely the stunning Catherine Deneuve and the imposing Michel Piccoli, and it stands out against those movies for being a bit closer to other directors’ work than her own. In Les Créatures, we follow the two actors as a married couple freshly relocated to a seaside town following a traumatic accident; Piccoli is a science fiction writer attempting to finish a story and Deneuve is pregnant and rendered mute by the accident. All is not well in the marriage and in the town, whose activities eerily match the plot points of Piccoli’s writing. A film about the awesome and tyrannical power of the creative process and its impact in the social relationships between men and women, themes that Varda returns to throughout her career, the overall energy of the film perhaps feels a bit more like Last Year at Marienbad or Bunuel than anything else Varda would ever make. To put it simply, it feels more like what you would expect of an European arthouse movie. Varda moves to Los Angeles following its release and commercial failure, kicking off the second phase of her career and reasserting her talents as cinema’s preeminent gleaner in works like Black Panthers, Uncle Yanco, and Mur Murs. That being said, I love the high absurdity and one-off charms of Les Créatures, just as much as I’m glad it stands out as being the only movie like it by Agnès. Plus it’s probably the second best chess movie of all time (moved down a spot after Stefan reminded me of the existence of Seventh Seal).
Moving Pawn to E4,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark