. . . And Hers

Moviegoers who have seen Jacques Demy's The Model Shop may also be curious about a picture by his wife, who is a director too. She is known professionally as Agnes Varda, and at first glance her work and her husband's seem totally different. While he conjures up pastel never-never lands, she broods over such weighty matters as morality, predestination and the nature of reality. But husband and wife do have in com-BOULAT mon two uncommon traits: the ability to reduce everything to playground platitudes and a stylistic pomposity that serves only to accent the vacuity of their scripts. In Les Creatures, which Varda has dedicated to her husband, she has fashioned a kind of portrait of the artist in finger paints, a childish and often embarrassing attempt to render life as the ultimate fiction.

The plot is the sort of thing that gives science fiction a bad name. A writer (Michel Piccoli) and his mute wife (Catherine Deneuve) live in an abandoned fort on the coast of Brittany. She is pregnant; he is trying to write. Gradually, he conceives a weird fantasy about a mad engineer who plants control devices on the populace to destroy their free will. Reality begins to blur as the mad engineer invites the writer to sit down at an enormous electronic chessboard on which the townspeople are the pieces and the prize is the wife's fate. Writer and engineer grapple over the game board as lives are changed, ruined and revived. Or are they? The writer's story becomes the film's own plot; illusion and reality are inextricably and ever so modishly mixed. With the bad guy getting killed, the baby getting born, and the wife regaining her voice, there is even a happy ending.

Formerly a photographer for Realties and Paris Match, Madame Demy has an unerring instinct for the stylishly avantgarde. She photographed Les Creatures as if it were a Vogue layout, and edited it elliptically. She even tinted the fantasy scenes to avoid confusion: red for those influenced by the mad engineer at his game board, a benign pink for the writer-hero. The trouble is that she seems to take the hero's fantasy as seriously as he does. As in her other films (Cleo from 5 to 7, Le Bonheur), she mistakes pulp for pith and winds up only with pretension.

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