Women Reply

What is it like to be a woman in 1975? This is the question Agnès Varda is trying to answer 'Réponse de Femmes', in a style quite characteristic of the politically committed cinema of the 1960's and 1970's. This short could accordingly be awfully outdated but for Varda's ability to turn a series of boring slogans into a stimulating experience, inventive and poetic as her findings are.

In what she calls a 'ciné-tract', in fact a short made for French TV, Varda has various female persons, ranging from a baby girl to a top model to an old woman appear before her camera and tell the spectator about themselves (except for the baby of course!): about the way they look, about sex and desire, about advertising and last but not least about the disputed motherly instinct. They can be beautiful, unprepossessing or outright ugly but little does it matter: they want to be treated as persons and not consumers and sex toys before ending up asold ghosts good to be forgotten and discarded. They protest against the conditioning imposed on them by society and the stifling sex roles that go with it.

The most striking thing about this pamphlet is the scene in which a pregnant woman dances naked in front of the camera and without the least ounce of shame for that. It is beautiful and moving. Of course you must not be a puritan to appreciate such a rare scene,like some of the Antenne 2 viewers who at the time of release complained to the channel about such a 'scandal'. But there is more to life than a series of taboos, isn't there?

Agnès Varda's "Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex" is a "cine-essay" that attempts to answer the anthropological question "what is a woman?" by showing a wide-variety of unique women in the purest and sometimes most conventional form. For eight minutes, Varda depicts women addressing the audience about how they are more than a role, more than a babymaking unit, and more than meets the eye, most of all. Varda was a filmmaker during the time of the French New Wave, as well as a filmmaker who brought upon the importance of documentary/feminist filmmaking throughout her work in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. "Women Reply" Our Bodies, Our Sex" tries to coherently answer its question by first addressing the fact that women are more than the sum of their breasts, buttocks, and vagina, by showing us them in the purest form. It then shows heavier women, skinnier women, pregnant women, short women, and tall women, providing us with the ideas that all of these women have the potential to make a large difference in modern society as we know it. In 2014, these ideas sound like age-old answers to some of the most redundant questions asked. Looking at this particular short from the perspective of 1975, one sees its true value and artistry thanks to its directness and its willingness to take a stand and answer a very broad, open-ended question, even if the stand and the answer may be worth more than an eight minute short.

NOTE: The film can be viewed on the popular website MUBI, mubi.com/films/women-reply-our-bodies-our-sex

Directed by: Agnès Varda.