Lions Love (.and Lies)

In Agnès Varda's cool and loose 'film within a film', Hair creators Gerome Ragni and James Rado, and Warhol Superstar Viva are actors waiting for their big break.

They rent a house in the Hollywood Hills and spend their days lounging by the pool, lazing in their giant bed contemplating ways to achieve spiritual enlightenment.

When a frenetic New York filmmaker (Shirley Clarke) arrives, their carefree existence starts to warp. The artistic compromises of Hollywood get to Clarke and before long she is downing pills to end it all.

Just as the beer can hits her lips, she turns to the camera and says to Agnès, "I can't do it, this whole thing, it's not my style!" Exasperated, Varda swaps shirts with Clarke, steps into frame and starts to act out the scene herself.

Set against a backdrop of the Warhol assassination attempt and the Bobby Kennedy shooting, Varda's trippy tale gives way to a deeper statement on Hollywood and the American Dream.

In the late '60s when Agnès Varda and her husband, Jacques Demy, travelled to America, she said of the experience, "in '67, France was really dull, and being in America, it was like this shower of freedom, counterculture, the way people spoke and dressed. There was all this loving, and all these 'happenings', all these meetings, picnics with people, sharing things."

Varda explained that Lions Love "is about stars, movies, rented houses, freedom in love, plastic flowers, freedom of final cut, trees, television and the shooting and death of Bobby Kennedy."

". a portrait of its era as daring and cogent as Antonioni's Zabriskie Point." - Not Coming To a Theatre Near You

Official Selection - New York Film Festival (1969)