A hundred and one for the road

Monsieur Simon Cinema, the film director hero of Agnès Varda’s Les Cent et Une Nuits, is about to celebrate his hundredth birthday; a sprightly soul with a roving eye, he can still get around in a wheelchair. To prolong his life, he embarks on a hundred and one nights of storytelling and remembering– “aerobics for the memory” – stimulated by daily conversations with an attractive film student, Camille (Julie Gayet), who chats with him about his favourite movies in between visits from an Italian friend (Marcello Mastroianni, playing himself) and other famous actors.

Conceived as a documentary to celebrate the French centenary of cinema, the film brings a gentle irony to bear on the subject; Varda is plainly aware that we will all be thoroughly tired of celebrating the Lumière brothers by the time the actual anniversary comes around in November. Most of those who have worked with Varda in the past, or with her late husband, Jacques Demy (the author of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg), agreed to appear, however briefly, in the new film, and rightly so, for it is a loving tribute to their art, skillfully blending their real-life personalities and film personae. It is a pleasure to see it so sensitively directed and to discover a new crop of actors, including Gayet, making a film within a film under the untutored direction of her screen boyfriend, Mica (Mathieu Demy).

The plot is no more than a pretext for a celluloid review of the past hundred years, as visualized by Simon Cinema, a museum piece who claims to be “le cinéma à lui tout seul,” played with gusto by Michel Piccoli. But if the old man’s memory is weak, Varda’s is not. A true connoisseur, she knows the meaning of Citizen Kane’s Rosebud and whether it was Fellini or Godard who first filmed a man with his hat on in the bath (Piccoli in Le Mépris wins by a narrow two months against Mastroianni in Otto e Mezzo). A shrewd critic, she compares Renoir’s Le Fleuve (unfavourably) with Satyajit Ray, detects a comic likeness between Piccoli and Depardieu, and frames the whole American movie industry between Hellzapoppin’ and Mary Poppins. The range of quotation is international, although Britain is curiously absent—a strange omission given that Jeremy Thomas is a co-producer—apart from a cardboard cut-out of Alfred Hitchcock and glimpses of Jane Birkin in France and Emily Lloyd in Los Angeles.

Les Cent et Une Nuits is also a feminine work of art, its apparently whimsical threads woven together with great care; Varda draws patterns by surrealistic association without anthologizing clips or compiling a prize list. Simon’s memory may be erratic, but he can still rattle off a dozen titles without pausing for breath when asked which films were released in 1985. And his confusion allows him to move with impertinent ease from one picture to the next. Some extracts are prefaced by wild puns: “Sous le soulier de satin,” spoken while raising one of Marilyn Monroe’s shoes in an imaginary champagne toast, in fact introduces a clip from Sous le Soleil de Satan. Most of the dialogue is excerpted from the original screenplays and so subtly transposed that the diversion from the original context can easily pass unnoticed. Varda’s selection bears out Godard’s dictum that “le moral c’est le travelling.”

To many, the centenary festivities seem futile, with the French film industry under increasing threat of extinction, but the witty game of quotation and reference played out in Les Cent et Une Nuits refuses to indulge nostalgia or pessimism while nicely distinguishing between memory and commemoration. Issuing from a cow much like one in L’Age d’Or, the voice of Luis Buñuel declares all commemorations fallacious and deadly, concluding with a “Vive l’oubli” which sounds all too close to “Viva la muerte.” Varda counters this with a “Vive le desk” in the final scene when Camille is discovered in a frantic embrace with a new lover.

It doesn’t matter that the heroine proves fickle; the cinema, after all, is one love affair after another. What matters most, as Jeanne Moreau reminds us, is the creative fidelity of couples such as Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Sternberg and Dietrich, Demy and Deneuve. Death is treated lightly. A disturbing figure, reminiscent of Cocteau’s Orphée, reappears at intervals to warn the hero of his mortality, but the sight of Gérard Depardieu, reliving some of his most exquisite screen agonies, turns the warning into high comedy and reassures us that cinema is also just one death after another. Simon is, in any case, continually revived by “shots”—pictures, injections, banknotes. (Money is one obsession the rich but miserly centenarian shares with the younger generation, who also have an old-fashioned taste for old-fashioned millionaires.)

Varda has little to say on the subject of directors, few of whom are actually heard speaking for themselves. Young Mica is jealous of Monsieur Cinema’s achievements, however, and is repeatedly told he should try to invent something new, rather than imitate old gangster movies or cheap pulp fictions – an implied criticism of the 1990s Nouvelle Vague, blunted somewhat by the fact that Varda’s own son plays the budding director. Varda recommends a discreet independence in all things, but she is not complacent and pokes fun at the French cinema’s love-hate relationship with Hollywood.

The obsolete quaintness of French manners is underlined when Simon opens the Cannes festival wearing a Louis XV wig, wanders like a ghost up and down Sunset Boulevard, and shakes hands with a politely bemused Harrison Ford. He eventually bequeaths his fortune to a garish Liz Taylor clone, covered with paste diamonds, at a charity gala for the miners in Germinal. Varda’s lessons are maternal and good-humoured to the end. As the credits begin to roll, departing members of the audience are brought back to their seats by a housebreaking Mastroianni and kept there, reading obediently, until the last name on the screen fades out.

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