“A radical blend of genres and moods that matches its artistic originality with its protagonists’ quietly revolutionary audacity. A personal film of epochal scope, it spans more than a decade of historic changes regarding gender relations and the rights of women.” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker)
Agnès Varda’s feminist anthem, perhaps her most political film, is both a buoyant chronicle of a transformative friendship and an empowering vision of sisterhood. When teenage Pauline (Valérie Mairesse) helps Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard)—a struggling mother of two—procure the money for an abortion, a deep bond forms. The two remain powerfully linked over the course of more than a decade as each searches for her place in the world—a world that, in Varda’s imaginative presentation, includes blissed-out bohemian musical numbers and an Iranian adventure. Varda, on the frontlines of France’s abortion rights movement, was always a feminist, saying “I did all that—my photos, my craft, my film, my life—on my terms, my own terms, and not to do it like a man.” This intimate epic is a celebration of the power of women to lift each other up.