One Sings, the Other Doesn't

Varda made her feminist musical in 1977, four years after the Bobigny trial and two after abortion was legalised in France, and she made it as a friendship story rather than a polemic. It has been the least fashionable of her features for decades and is now, quite rightly, being reclaimed.

Pauline is seventeen and lives with disapproving parents; Suzanne is a few years older, unmarried, with two small children and no money. Pauline helps her get to Switzerland. Then they lose each other for ten years — Suzanne goes back to her parents' farm and eventually runs a family planning centre in the south, Pauline reinvents herself as Pomme and tours with a feminist band singing songs Varda wrote for the film. They correspond by postcard across the 1970s.

The songs are sincere and slightly awkward and Varda meant them to be: the film is arguing that political consciousness in that decade arrived through singing, marching and writing to your friends rather than through doctrine. It travels to Iran for a stretch, takes a detour into a marriage, and refuses throughout to make either woman's choices the correct ones. Critics at the time were divided over the sunniness. Seen now, in the Criterion edition that returned it to circulation, it is a rare thing — a film about the women's movement made from inside it, while it was still happening.