LGM Film Club, Part 558: One Sings, The Other Doesn’t

Agnes Varda is one of the greatest directors in film history, although oddly I couldn’t say that she has a film I think is perfect (Cleo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond are close). That really describes her 1977 film One Sings, The Other Doesn’t. This is the ultimate second-wave feminist film, for better and for maybe not so great. Valerie Mariesse plays Pauline, later known as Apple, a young feminist woman from a relatively well off background who isn’t taking any shit from her parents anymore. Mariesse later had a major role in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, another of the Great Films. Thérèse Liotard plays Suzanne, a much poorer woman who is with a loser photographer and has two small kids. Now she’s pregnant again. Pauline lies to her parents to get money for Suzanne to get an abortion. For that, she leaves home. Then the loser photographer kills himself. The two friends lose touch.

Ten years later, in 1972, they meet again at a rally in support of abortion rights. Apple is now part of a feminist folk singing group. She’s extremely performative as a person. Suzanne has gotten her shit together after being stuck at home with her very unsympathetic parents and now runs a reproductive health clinic. The story picks up from there. Apple is with an Iranian man who seems cool but maybe isn’t. And a lot of these scenes are actually shot in Iran , from the perspective of this French feminist as she is in love and then realized what being in this nation really means for a woman. Otherwise, she’s traveling around in her performative folk group. Suzanne is a very different person, responsible but lonely, raising her kids as a single mom. They write postcards to each other for most of the five years and their friendship grows and blossoms as they live their very different lives.

It’s probably the best film about the peak of the feminist movement that I’ve seen, a movement underrepresented in the film world due to the difficulties of women getting funding to make money. The other example here is Born in Flames, but that’s a perfect example of how the underfunding of women’s films made it so hard to make anything at all. Plus that’s a much more politically radical film than this. In fact, the response to One Sings, The Other Doesn’t was quite mixed. The men thought the feminazis had taken over cinema (Bosley Crowther in the Times), some women thought it was too bourgeoise, others thought it was right on.

I think it’s pretty right on too, but some of it does not age well. The feminist music/theater troupe is genuinely terrible. Some of it is kind of laughable. It’s also so fucking French. Breasts are everywhere here. I mean, Suzanne has a teenage daughter by the end of the film who is, er, rather well endowed. And there’s a scene where they are both bathing together and the nearly teenage son is just in the bathroom hanging out together and let’s just say a lot more of the adolescent human body is shown than in any American film. And then–and this is genuinely one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in a film–Apple is engaging in one of her feminist art projects and it’s a deal where she’s dancing around topless in some stage production. The Iranian boyfriend comes and they need to go get dinner or whatever. So she puts on a t-shirt. The t-shirt is white but the silkscreen in the middle is bare breasts, just over where her own breasts are. So yeah, it’s a t-shirt of tits. I paused the movie and just laughed and laughed. Greatest t-shirt ever.

There’s also the bizarre choice by Apple about child raising as her marriage to the Iranian is breaking up. Let’s just say that any viewer of this is going to have a lot of thoughts. But it would be too much of a spoiler. If you’ve seen the film, feel free in comments.

It really is a fascinating movie. Again, it’s unquestionably the most important film about mainstream second wave feminism I’ve seen. It’s not without its flaws and like much of the 70s, it doesn’t exactly age well a half-century later. But the world is much better for it being made, just like it was much better for Agnes Varda living.