Who is holding the camera
Lions Love is a self-reflexive, English-language French art film made in Los Angeles in 1969, directed and co-written by Agnès Varda as both fiction and documentary collage. It does not aim to tell a linear story but to hold up a cracked mirror to the intersecting worlds of underground theatre, Hollywood periphery, and late-1960s countercultural performance — particularly as they converge in a rented Beverly Hills house. Varda inserts herself as a character, filming while being filmed; she treats the house not as setting but as stage, archive, and contested site of authorship. The film’s ambition is structural: to dissolve distinctions between rehearsal and reality, between the making of Hair and the making of Lions Love, between visiting filmmaker Shirley Clarke and the fictional throuple who host her. It operates as an essay on presence — whose presence counts, whose voice is recorded, whose body occupies space — using the tools of narrative cinema without obeying its grammar. Its form is deliberately unstable: scenes loop, credits interrupt action, characters address the camera mid-sentence, and the soundtrack often contradicts what is seen. This is not improvisation for spontaneity’s sake, but choreographed instability — a method of questioning how stories about liberation get framed, funded, and fetishised. (158 words)
The look of it
The film works through juxtaposition rather than progression: Viva, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado play versions of themselves — actors from Hair living collectively — while Eddie Constantine and Carlos Clarens appear as semi-fictionalised avatars of European cool and film-critical authority. Shirley Clarke enters as both guest and interlocutor, her presence anchoring the film in real-world avant-garde practice. Varda’s direction keeps the camera mobile but unobtrusive, often shooting from low angles or through doorways to emphasise enclosure and surveillance. Joseph Byrd’s score uses dissonant electronic textures and fragmented piano motifs that resist mood-setting; Robert Dalva’s editing cuts across temporal logic — inserting footage of Varda driving, or of a lion roaring, without explanation. Performances are stylised but not theatrical: Ragni and Rado speak with the cadence of lyricists, their lines hovering between confession and parody; Viva’s stillness reads as resistance, not passivity. There is no conventional plot, only recurring situations — meals, arguments, screen tests, conversations about money and art — repeated with slight variations. The craft serves a principle: every technical choice foregrounds the act of construction, never conceals it. Nothing feels accidental, even when it appears so. (159 words)
Who gets to speak
What lands is the film’s sustained tonal ambiguity — its refusal to settle into satire, homage, or critique. The tension between Beverly Hills luxury and bohemian rhetoric remains palpable throughout: a swimming pool becomes a site of both leisure and alienation; a mirrored wall reflects not just bodies but competing claims to authenticity. Viva’s physical presence — calm, watchful, rarely speaking at length — carries quiet authority against the men’s voluble theorising. The film’s most effective moments are those where form and subject coincide: when Ragni recites Hair lyrics while walking past palm trees, the dissonance between revolutionary language and Californian placidity registers without commentary. Similarly, the insertion of archival footage — of protests, of studio lots, of Varda’s own earlier films — works not as illustration but as counterpoint, reminding the viewer that liberation narratives are always already mediated. The film also succeeds in rendering the exhaustion of perpetual performativity: the way characters rehearse interviews, re-enact arguments, or pause mid-sentence to check how they’re being filmed. This is not irony as detachment, but irony as diagnostic tool — revealing how identity, politics, and desire become legible only through repetition and framing. (157 words)
How it holds together
What does not land is the film’s reliance on insider reference without sufficient scaffolding. Without knowledge of Hair’s cultural position in 1968–69, or of Shirley Clarke’s standing in American experimental film, several sequences read as inert — conversations about ‘the system’ or ‘authenticity’ lack grounding in concrete stakes. The meta-layer — Varda filming herself filming — risks becoming a closed circuit, especially when the film’s self-awareness does not extend to interrogating its own access: the house is rented, the crew is professional, the subjects are paid performers, yet the film gestures toward communal poverty without examining its own material conditions. Some performances falter under the weight of abstraction: Eddie Constantine’s role as a detached Gallic observer feels underwritten, his presence more symbolic than dramatic. The soundtrack, though inventive, occasionally overwhelms dialogue without compensating rhythmically — a problem exacerbated in mono mixes where Byrd’s electronics bleed into speech. Crucially, the film assumes familiarity with the New York underground film scene of the mid-1960s; viewers unfamiliar with Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, or the Film-Makers’ Cooperative may find the references opaque rather than evocative. This is not a failure of execution but of calibration — the film’s density works best for those already fluent in its dialect. (159 words)
What it is really about
The themes that matter are authorship, appropriation, and the domestication of dissent. Lions Love treats the house not as private refuge but as a contested production site — where scripts are rewritten, identities recast, and political slogans repurposed for lifestyle branding. It asks how radical language migrates from Broadway stages to Beverly Hills patios, and what gets lost in translation: Ragni and Rado’s lyrics about revolution sit uneasily beside their discussion of residuals and agent commissions. The film also examines gendered labour in collaborative art: Viva’s silence, Clarke’s critical gaze, and Varda’s dual role as director and participant all map different modes of agency within male-dominated creative economies. Another persistent theme is the instability of documentation — footage shot by Varda is later screened back to the cast, who comment on their own portrayal, exposing how memory, performance, and recording reshape each other. There is no nostalgia here, only scrutiny: the film treats 1969 not as a moment of promise but as a hinge point where countercultural energy begins its slow absorption into infrastructure — studios, galleries, universities, even this very film. These concerns remain urgent, not because the film predicts them, but because it models how to track power in the spaces between intention and image. (158 words)
Who it is for
This film is for viewers who approach cinema as a set of questions rather than a source of answers — those comfortable with unresolved syntax, who value formal rigour over emotional payoff, and who recognise that satire need not be funny to be precise. It rewards patience with texture: the grain of 16mm stock, the echo in a tiled kitchen, the way light falls differently on a polyester shirt versus a silk scarf. It is not for those seeking narrative momentum, psychological realism, or catharsis — nor for viewers who expect historical context to be explained rather than embedded. Some critics have found its tone arch or detached; others argue it underestimates the sincerity of its subjects. A change in verdict would require either a deeper excavation of the financial and institutional scaffolding behind the house — the producers, the rental agreement, the distribution deal — or a more sustained engagement with the racial exclusions implicit in its vision of Californian utopia. As it stands, it is a film that demands alignment, not accommodation. (159 words)
Whether it is worth your time
Yes, it is worth your evening — but only if you watch it twice, and only if you accept that its value lies in friction, not fluency. First viewing reveals structure and surface; second reveals how often the film undermines its own premises — how Varda’s control is constantly questioned by her subjects, how the ‘carefree’ lifestyle depends on invisible labour, how the lion in the title is never shown but repeatedly invoked as metaphor. It is not pleasurable in the conventional sense, but it is exacting and intelligent — a rare case of a film that treats its audience as co-investigators rather than consumers. Those who dislike it tend to cite its perceived coldness or obscurity; they are not wrong, but they mistake restraint for indifference. What changes the verdict is not better exposition but deeper tolerance for ambiguity — the willingness to sit with a film that refuses to resolve the tension between participation and observation, between love and ownership, between lions and love. That tension is the point. (159 words)
