Review of One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977)

Moving picture, 120 minutes

Seen in 2018.

15 years in the lives of two fairly ordinary women.

My first experience with Varda. It’s cozy. The musical numbers, in particular, reminded me a great deal of Röda bönor. One of the songs is called “Papa Engels”, referring to Friedrich Engels saying that in the family, the man is the burgher (bourgeois) and the woman is the proletarian. This use of “papa” prefigures the use of “daddy” in still-more ironic feminist filmmaking 40 years later: Natalie Wynn, Lindsay Ellis et al. I also enjoyed the prescient look at a pre-revolutionary, beautiful but teeteringly traditional Iran.

moving picture fiction