Slideshow
LIONS LOVE (... AND LIES)
France/U.S., 1969
Directed by Agnès Varda
Starring Viva, James Rado, Gerome Ragni
Approx. 112 min.
With Viva, from Warhol’s Factory; James Rado and Gerome Ragni, creators of the rock musical Hair; and filmmaker Shirley Clarke as her stars, Varda employed some key figures in the New York underground scene to make this semi-improvised low-budget feature about stardom, sex, the American dream, and Hollywood—which film critic Carlos Clarens says in a cameo is not a place but “a state of mind.” With television footage of the RFK assassination, the shooting of Andy Warhol, and the attempted suicide of the filmmaker played alternately by Clarke and Varda, this metacinematic experiment captures the chaos—both whimsical and tragic—of the time.
Reviews
“Varda duly tips her hat to Warhol (and has the characters react to news of his shooting), but her filmmaking is more playful, alive with visual, editorial, and musical jokes.”
– Dennis Harvey, San Francisco Bay Guardian
“An oddly affecting anarchic view of aspects of a new American sensibility... a collage of aspiring actors awaiting their opportunity in Hollywood, it stars Viva and the two creators of Hair in a casual menage a trois—in which sex and nudity are neither issues nor proselytizing slogans.”
– Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art