Critics reviews

The film teems with Varda’s effortless ebullience, its world scooped from inside her head and thrown into the frame like paint onto a canvas.

There is a powerful sense of optimism that lingers all around those photos, those faces, those idyllic, long holiday nights spent together in the company of other women, men and kids. . . . One Sings, the Other Doesn’t is still a portrait, but one of two extraordinary women who, markedly different as they may be, both fought for the same right: “to gain the happiness of being a woman.”

Varda’s versatility, longevity and cheerful matriarch image have made her cinema’s most distinctive feminist role model, and the time is clearly right to rediscover different achievements of feminist history, meaning that One Sings, the Other Doesn’t couldn’t be more timely a re-release. But despite its historical importance and its relevance to contemporary debate, it hasn’t, in itself, dated well.

It advocates for reproductive rights and fulfillment in employment beyond marital domesticity — second-wave feminist concerns that, as last week’s abortion referendum in Ireland reminded us, are an ongoing battle. The movie’s audacious irreverence and playful, musical form feel as fresh as ever, as does its call to women to embrace unfettered self-expression by any unconventional means.

The film, a sort-of musical about the decade-spanning friendship between two women, ultimately finds Varda in a relatively commercial mode: this is a project designed to attract a wider, specifically female, viewership than she ever had before. But its accessibility doesn't indicate the sacrificing of any political rigor.