That’s a lot of producers…
Oh, right! There was a section in the documentary Varda made about herself (I think) about his — Varda got a whole lot of money to do this movie (after the success of Jaquot de Nantes), and it features Marcello Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Anouk Aimée, Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu… and everybody else. And if I remember correctly, it absolutely bombed at the box office, and Varda never got financing to do a “real” movie ever again. I guess The Gleaners and I is the closest, and that’s a documentary of sorts…
I may be confabulating, though; my intelligence is very artificial. Let’s see…
Wow. Just a single review? And what did it say?
And it’s from a blog! How useless! Nobody reads blogs!
There were apparently real reviews, but nobody at Rottentomatoes have bothered to integrate them:
Variety’s Lisa Nesselson gave a mixed review: “Agnes Varda, who has been making movies for 40 of the 100 years that motion pictures have existed, has put everything she knows about filmmaking and much of what she loves about the cinema into A Hundred and One Nights [sic]. But despite a star-decked cast and manifest good intentions, Varda’s self-described ‘divertimento’ soars in only a few spots.”
OK, let’s watch this thing…
That’s Mastroianni…
I’m quite enjoying this so far — it’s very whimsical, but it’s centred: It’s all about movies.
So I’m wondering whether that’s how it was sold to the investors — as a cross between 8½ and Cinema Paradiso: Broadly sentimental and amusing about being really into movies.
All of a sudden everything turned really boring… Dunno why.
Oh my god! Varda brought Sandrine Bonnaire’s character from Sans toit ni loi back from the dead! *sniff* I’m kinda tearing up…
Le bonheur…
Heh. She’s doing a nuit americaine with an American actor… how appropriate…
It’s brimming with Easter eggs — tiny references to other movies. But sometimes it seems like Varda doesn’t trust the nerdy audience to get the references. Like, in one ten second scene, a guy in 50s clothes and his boy shows up and steals a bike. That’s a fun reference to the de Sica movie, right? But then it’s spoilt a few scenes later when the guy goes “Italian neorealism strikes again”.
And, yes, it bombed.
I really enjoyed this movie. It’s so playful and amusing, but is also affecting. It’s almost, almost a masterpiece — but some of the scenes (especially some of the scenes with the most famous people (de Niro, Delon, Depardieu)) fell flat. (OK, the Delon scene was amusing.)
So I’m going with:
Les cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma. Agnès Varda. 1995. ⚄
The extras are fun, too.
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