Les cent et une nuits
France / England,
1995, 125 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Agnès Varda
- prod
-
Dominique Vignet
- scr
-
Agnès Varda
- cam
-
Eric Gautier
- editor
-
Hugues Darmois
- cast
-
Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni, Henri Garcin, Julie Gayet, Mathieu Demy, Emmanuel Salinger
- source
-
Cine—Tamaris
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Agnès Varda in person.
OTHER
Doyenne of the cinema Agnès Varda has created her own celebration for its 100th anniversary. Monsieur Cinéma (Michel Piccoli), nearly 100 years old and wheelchair-bound, lives in a castle crammed Xanadu-like with movie memorabilia. To refresh his sometimes unreliable memory, he hires a lovely young film student to make his memory do “aerobics” by talking with him about the movies for 101 nights. Camille, who has her own ambitions as a filmmaker (and confidence artist), is delighted to meet the famous actors who drop by. Varda brings out a star-studded cast for her dazzling and nostalgic tribute to the magical art of film and embellishes her lighthearted plot (a missing heir, a vast fortune) with cinematic tricks galore. The inventors, the showmen, the auteurs, the heartthrobs—cinema’s aristocracy is playfully interwoven in clips, photos and more-than-just-cameo performances. From the "Lumière Brothers" outlined in electric light bulbs to Jean Paul-Belmondo as a bullfighter, from Jeanne Moreau and Alain Delon to Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu, from Robert DeNiro to Harrison Ford, Varda lovingly and generously displays the riches of the art form she has watched and practiced for so long. And outside, in the filmic real world, cinema is still very much alive: Camille now wants the rejuvenated M. Cinéma to appear in her movie. And thus the two worlds converge to make this homage a truly joyous celebration.
—Barbara Stone
FACTOID #188
According to an item in the 1969 Halloween edition of the Hollywood Reporter, Swedish director Bo Widerberg cancelled a Festival tribute at the last minute with a cryptic telegram from Stockholm that read, ’Sorry impossible to come. Must stay in bed.’
