Documenteur

Sabine Mamou is a writer living with her son in Los Angeles.

When Agnès Varda makes a movie, she has my respectful attention, but this movie, in which Mlle Mamou, usually her editor, plays the role, with Mlle Varda's son, Matthieu Demy as her son, looks to be fairly unengaging. There's a stream of consciousness narration near the beginning, in which words and phrases are jumbled together, but that gradually disappears, until at the end the two of them sit, looking blankly at a mariachi band. Is the point to not to try to ascribe meaning, but accept the world as it is, or is that a sign of growing despair? I cannot tell. Perhaps Mlle Varda wanted to sit on the knife's edge between the two positions. If so, it's an uncomfortable position.