Les créatures [The Creatures] (1966)

(On Cable TV, September 2022) I watched Les creatures because it’s from writer-director Agnès Varda: absolutely not one of my favourite filmmakers, but such a significant figure in the history of French cinema that she earns a spot on the “should see their entire filmography at some point,” list. I was momentarily delighted to understand that Les creatures, beyond being (as blurbed), a film about “a writer being inspired by locals in writing his novel” was veering in Science Fiction, as the writer is working on an SF novel about people being possessed by mind-control devices. The film supposedly gets more fun once the barriers between reality and fiction break down (albeit relying a lot on the tired trope of the writer being unable to write anything not taken from their lives—a spectacularly dumb thing to say about SF writers), but let’s qualify “fun” with “Varda”—she’s a glum filmmaker at her cheeriest, rarely determined to deliver a crowd-pleaser. As a result, Les créatures is a slog even when you buy into its overlaid premises. The low-budget production values constantly grate, and even having actors such as Catherine Deneuve isn’t much of a balm. The atmosphere of the small French town is far from being bucolic (the realistic cinematography doesn’t help) and the slap-dash directing (which occasionally uses tinting on the black-and-white images for effect) is frankly disappointing. Even in its imperfect state, I found a few things of interest in Les creatures that a more populist filmmaker could reuse to good effect. But Varda is almost audience-hostile at times, and this film suffers from too-elaborate artistic intentions that are not supported by basic watchability. The film ended up being a such a failure upon release that Varda repurposed the celluloid of the movie into an art installation called Ma cabane de l’échec (My Cabin of Failure). Which may be the funniest thing ever said about Les creatures.