Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma (1995)
Directed by Agnès Varda

Film Review

One of the weirder attempts to mark the centenary of the birth of cinema (as defined by the Lumière brothers' patenting of their Cinematograph) is Agnès Varda's Les Cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma, a chaotic snowstorm of cinematic references that is as crazy as it sounds.  Not one of Varda's more considered films, this earnest but totally incoherent homage to the seventh art soon burns up its stock of good will and ends up collapsing under the weight of its bloated pretensions. The barrage of big name actors that Varda keeps hurling in our direction (not always with flattering results) provides some amusement value but the lack of even the faintest approximation to something resembling a structured narrative makes this appear to be no more than an exercise in self-indulgence that has totally run away with itself.

Michel Piccoli, virtually unrecognisable in a long white wig, is Varda's idea of the personification of cinema - a man apparently close to death and wallowing in past triumphs like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, complete with a butler that is a dead ringer for Erich von Stroheim.  Is this really how Varda sees cinema, as something at death's door, endlessly dwelling in the past?  Even Alain Delon is turned away when he takes the trouble to turn up in his helicopter (although he does get a nice consolation prize).  Unsure whether he is Michel Piccoli or everyone who ever had anything to do with cinema (including Hitchcock and Catherine Deneuve), Piccoli spends most of his time reminiscing with A-list French and Italian film stars (Varda's appreciation of cinema apparently extends no further than mainland Europe and Hollywood).  With Marcello Mastroianni, Piccoli gets into a heated argument over whether Fellini plagiarised Godard (or vice versa).  With Gérard Depardieu, he compares on-screen deaths, Depardieu apparently winning by a head (thanks to his role in Danton).  Sandrine Bonnaire turns up begging for food, an allusion to her breakthrough role in Varda's Sans toit ni loi (1985), before suddenly turning into Joan of Arc for no apparent reason.  You have to have watched quite a lot of films for any of this to make any kind of sense.

Interspersed between these flights of nostalgic fancy is a vague semblance of a storyline involving Varda's son Mathieu Demy struggling to make his first film with Julie Gayet.  What could have been the backbone the film badly needs turns out to be an irritating series of digressions, as neither Demy nor Gayet's characters is remotely sympathetic and both give the the worst possible impression of today's young filmmakers.  Spared Demy's macho posturing we might have had even more in the way of whimsical self-referential fantasy, such as Catherine Deneuve's sentimental journey with Robert De Niro, which ends, predictably, in a Mafia-style killing (with Piccoli holding the gun).  An Elizabeth Taylor look-a-like (looking even scarier than the real thing, but no doubt a lot cheaper) provides the funniest moment in this epic exercise in navel-contemplation, although hearing Luis Buñuel's voice come out of a cow (of the farmyard variety) comes a close second.   What a way to celebrate your 100th birthday.

Film Synopsis

Simon Cinéma is an old man who lives alone in a castle museum with his faithful butler Firmin.  A one time actor, producer and filmmaker, he is convinced that he is the last word on cinema.  As he approaches his one hundredth birthday, Monsieur Cinéma becomes anxious that he is losing his memory and so hires a young film student, Camille, to help keep the recollections of his glorious past alive.  For Camille, this is a Heaven-sent opportunity to realise her ambition, which is to make her first film...