Directed by Agnès Varda • 1966 • France
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, Eva Dahlbeck
One of Agnès Varda least-seen films is also one of her most fascinating: an eccentrically imaginative science-fiction fantasia that touches on human nature, free will, and the creative process. Working with major stars for the first time on a feature film, Varda casts Michel Piccoli as a writer and Catherine Deneuve as his silent wife, a couple who relocate to the island of Noirmoutier (a longtime second home for Varda and her husband, Jacques Demy) where strange goings-on hint at a sinister force controlling the minds and actions of the residents. Slipping between “reality” and fiction, genre spectacle and avant-garde experimentation, LES CRÉATURES (“The Creatures”) is a beguiling, endlessly inventive exploration of the mysterious alchemy that transforms life into art.
Up Next in French New Wave
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Masculin féminin
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1966 • France
Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Marlène JobertWith MASCULIN FÉMININ (“Masculine Feminine”), ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engag...
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Weekend
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967 • France
Starring Mireille Darc, Jean YanneThis scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while...
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La collectionneuse
Directed by Eric Rohmer • 1967 • France
Starring Haydée Politoff, Patrick Bauchau, Daniel PommereulleA bombastic, womanizing art dealer and his painter friend go to a seventeenth-century villa on the Riviera for a relaxing summer getaway. But their idyll is disturbed by the presence of the bohe...
