(2 of 2)
One Sings, the Other Doesn't is a frankly feminist film about two friends whose lives are altered by the women's move ment of the 1960s. Coming from gifted French Director Agnes Varda (Le Bon-heur), it is a surprisingly lazy and self-indulgent work. Rather than trust her char- acters to convey the film's content, the director smothers the movie with a voice-over narration that lectures the audience on the Meaning of It All. Art — even political art as didactic as this — is supposed to show, not tell.
If Varda had any startling insights, One Sings might be tolerable — but this movie seems to be pitched at audiences that have never heard of feminism be fore. What one mainly carries away from the film are its pretensions: its needlessly fractionalized narrative, its Helen Reddy-level song lyrics (by Varda) and its condescending insistence on embracing all of humanity. —F.R.