The New York Times
Monday, September 22, 1969
FILM FETE: VIVA, RAGNI AND RADO IN "LIONS LOVE"
Movie by Agnes Varda Is Set in Hollywood
The Cast:
LIONS LOVE, written, directed and produced by Agnes Varda. At the New York Film Festival, Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. Running time: 115 minutes.
With: Viva, Gerome Ragni, James Rado, Shirley Clarke, Carlos Clarens and Eddie Constantine.
By Vincent Canby
At its best, Agnes Varda's "Lions Love" is a beautiful, cockeyed movie about a menage a trois - Viva, Gerome Ragni and James Rqado - who live on a Hollywood hilltop in a rented house with a giant bed, a heated swimming pool and plastic plants, mixed with real ones, both indoors and out.
The three performers, who ostensibly play themselves as they wait for the big Hollywood break, couldn't care less about the new morality as defined in a sniggery movie like "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." Viva and Jerry and Jim have passed beyond that frontier into a new innocence. Like three children on an extended sleep-out, they loll about in bed together in the morning, arguing cheerfully about who's going to get the coffee and making crank telephone calls ("Hello, Bank of America? I'd like to order $200 to go").
Later Viva decides they should have children, but she regards the prospect of pregnancy without enthusiasm. "Do you think I could go through nine months of it and only come out with one?" Instead, they borrow some children to see what the experience might be like - and it's disaster. The kids refuse to take naps, urinate in the pool and eat nothing but french fries drenched in catchup. "I think," says Viva, "we have to find another way to spiritual life."
In all of these random details, "Lions Love," which was shown at the New York Film Festival Saturday night and again yesterday afternoon, is very funny, not much different from a television situation comedy, but one that is cool and loose and honest, more adult than most. It also possesses a sense of time and place. It's ironic that Miss Varda, whose husband, Jacques Demy, the gifted French director, tried unsuccessfully to capture the banal beauty of Los Angeles in his "The Model Shop," does just that in "Lions Love" without seeming to try very hard.
For about half the time, "Lions Love" is a kind of meta-Warhol movie, which is charming. Miss Varda has taken Viva, Warhol's most valuable found object, and lit and framed her in a way that brings out the gentle pre-Raphaelite beauty suggested but never realized in things like "Bike Boys," "Lonesome Cowboy" and "Blue Movie." Miss Varda has also found two perfect foils for Viva in the two stars and authors of "Hair." Rado, blandly handsome and comparatively reserved, and Ragni, who looks and acts lilke a liberated member of the Three Stooges, share Viva's talent for the magnificently convoluted non sequitur.
Unfortunately, Miss Varda has not been content just to doll up a simple, native American genre. The director, whose French films "Cleo from 5 to 7" and "Le Bonheur" aspired to a seriousness never successfully communicated, has sought to give both Pirandellian and social dimensions to her contemporary fairy tale.
"Lions Love" tries to suggest multiple levels of reality by posing as a movie within a movie. Shirley Clarke, the real-life director ("The Connection," "The Cool World"), plays herself, newly arrived in Hollywood to make a New York style underground film with Viva as star. Throughout "Lions Love" the actors talk to Miss Varda behind the camera and at one point Miss Varda steps in to show Shirley how to play a scene, a suicide, which Shirley says "is not my style."
Earlier, Miss Clarke has observed: "I don't know whether I'm in a movie or directing one." Since the audience is never in doubt, this sort of thing is simply precious. Miss Varda goes further astray with an extended sequence devoted to the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, as reported and reduced to comprehensible terms on television.
At this point, you might as well turn away from the movie, which has gone glum and fake in all the wrong ways, and read an interview with Miss Varda, a five-page copy of which was given to the press by the producer.
Among other things, she says, "Lions Love" is about stars, movies, rented houses, freedom in love, plastic flowers, freedom of final cut, trees, television and the shooting and death of Bobby Kennedy. It is about stars and movies, all right, but it's no more about any of the other things than the telephone directory is about the names it lists.
In addition to the players already mentioned, "Lions Love" includes brief appearances by Eddie Constantine and Carlos Clarens, the film buff extraordinary (author of the excellent "An Illustrated History of the Horror Film"), who acts as Miss Clarke's walking Guide Michelin to Hollywood and narrates a delightful montage of views of Lotus Land as it is today. There is so much that is so pleasant in "Lions Love" that I wish Miss Varda hadn't tried to give it a larger significance, which - I'd like to add at the risk of sounding chauvinistic - seems paradoxically very naive and very French intellectual.
