82

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• What a wonderful camera Agnes Varda wields! It’s so curious and lively, taking equal pleasure in sculptors’ models and frog-swallowing street performers – the perfect cure for Cleo’s self-obsession. What an excellent pairing this made with last week’s Ikiru.

• I know it was beautiful but it felt twice as long as it was.

• Elegant clothes, stunning lead, and wonderfully atmospheric Parisian locations (we can almost smell the cafe-au-lait, croissants, garlic and Gauloises) but like a delightfully mistimed souffle, it rises and then collapses under its own steam.

• It was wonderfully mysterious watching Varda transform Cleo. And great scenes of real people, some catching the camera’s eye as they went about their lives.

• Once you’ve seen one of Varda’s films multiple times, you start to realise how cutting and sarcastic she can be. The first time around, you’re stuck in Cleo’s mind for a couple of hours. The second time, you start to notice all that’s going on around her. Cleo’s health scare is genuinely upsetting but Varda can’t help but remind you that the man she’s flirting with is being sent to crush the Algerian Revolution. History continues around the edges of the frame like kittens tugging at her dress.

88

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• A little long perhaps, but nonetheless imbued with the stunning visuals, understated acting, and deeply-felt humanism that sadly disappeared from most movies many moons ago.

• So beautiful. So tragic. Yet, even when bearing the soul crushing weight of the human condition, Kurosawa manages to find warmth, humour, wit and tenderness in the midst of such existentially rich material. Profoundly beautiful. So glad I got to experience this for the first time in a theatre.

• The times may change but bureaucracy is eternal.

• I liked how for a really sad story, it has a lot of joy in it. Admittedly, parts of it were a little bit too familiar as a public servant at times.

• A couple of hours hanging with Watanabe and Kurosawa – total bliss. Ikiru is from now on my umbrella-in-a-rainstorm film.

90

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• Eschewing generic biopic narrative of becoming a successful artist in favour of a painfully vulnerable personal story of trauma and community is incredibly moving. The anti-Sackler activist thread not only blends surprisingly well, but the two contextualise each other brilliantly.

• Good – but the film slightly struggled to live up to the complexities and wondrous beauty of Goldin’s art and activism.

• Went home through the rain and lit a candle.

• Beautiful, moving and well-crafted biography which at first feels wide ranging as it explores different aspects of Goldin’s life, work, and activism, but the connections become increasingly apparent. When the Conrad quote appears, about “a crop of inextinguishable regrets” the strands come together with devastating effect.

• I was bursting to talk to someone afterwards about the themes of this film. The power and influence of money — distortion of wealth, to that degree, really is unnatural without the gross exploitation of people. Also, Nan Goldin’s photos are absolutely captivating. Stunning, stunning portraiture.

84

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• In honour of the Broadway accountancy scene can we speculate how Bob Fosse expensed all the cocaine that was clearly required to make this epic.

• No words can adequately explain what I love about this film. Thank you WFS for introducing me to it. What a treasure.

• I first saw this many years ago as a young person who had not witnessed death and had barely contemplated my own mortality. It plays different now. A masterpiece of self-regard, regret and self-loathing.

• This is the best musical that doesn’t really have a single song until the very end where it dumps like five songs onto you. I like this surreal hallucinatory ending but I think it could’ve gotten there a bit quicker. For all its faults, it’s very funny!

• The expansive subtlety with which this film begins makes me very glad to have seen it, but can’t justify for me the weight of musical emphasis in its final act. At that point, I remembered how bored I am of this story’s broad brushstrokes: the life of a brilliant fuckup who treats women badly and gets great art out of it. It was only when the film started using its broadest brushes, though, that I switched from ‘any story is good if told this well’ to ‘eh.’