Les 3 boutons

This is a short included on the first disc in the Criterion Varda box set… and it’s the only thing listed (except the main feature), but there’s a whole bunch of documentaries included, too. It’s like a cornucopia, but it’s gonna take months to watch the box if all disks are like this.

Varda uses CGI extensively here…

The performances are fine, but the whimsy seems forced, and it seems more like a way to play with CGI elements than anything else.

Les 3 boutons. Agnès Varda. 2015. ⚂

Varda par Agnès

OK, I’ve completed all the box sets I had going… so I can start a new one!

And I had to choose the Agnès Varda box set from Criterion simply because it has an oddball format and pokes out of the shelf I have the unseen movies on.

Makes sense to me!

Oddly enough (or perhaps not) the box sets starts with a film from 2019 — which is basically a talk Varda gave to present her movies. So we start the box set with an introduction… I wonder whether she made this with the box set in mind?

This isn’t just Varda talking with clips from movies — we get extensive bits from other “behind the scenes” movies Varda has done before, but it’s presented as if it’s part of the talk.

So it’s a kind of fictionalised presentation? Very strange genre.

Hey… that’s a different venue…

Oh, there’s a lot of different venues — she did a tour?

I dunno… I don’t think this movie quite works? Varda had a really interesting career, but this manages to make it seem kinda boring: It’s just one thing after another — first I did this, then I did this — without really telling us why we should be interested.

Yeah, that tracks: It’s just kinda boring. Which is something that Varda’s movies never are, usually.

(Well, she died a couple of weeks after the premiere, so perhaps that influenced the scores…)

Heh heh.

The final 20 minutes are really good, though, so let’s go with:

Varda by Agnès. Agnès Varda. 2019. ⚂

Call Her Savage

Very risque.

Is that a matte painting? Hm… Can it be?

That’s one weird-ass god.

I’m guessing that this is a pre-Hayes movie?

Well, I dunno… I mean, I haven’t seen that many movies with Clara Bow (the ‘it’ girl of the silents), and I guess that’s she’s fine here, but the movie kinda meanders weirdly — it seems so formless. We were presented first with one situation (which turned out to be her childhood, being attacked by Savages (I mean Native Americans)), and then another situation 18 years later (which I thought would be the movie), but then we move even later and that seems to be what the movie is really about?

That is, it took a long time to get to the actual plot, and by the time that happened, I’d rather lost interest…