Sometime during my bus trip from watching the 4-hour French culinary documentary Menus-Plaisirs at The Prytania to immediately follow it with the 3-hour Polish sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe at The Broad, it hit me.  If I lived in a bigger city with a full, robust repertory scene, I would have a weekly meltdown.  Thankfully, New Orleans is relatively laidback in its repertory programming, with most of the heavy lifting done by The Prytania’s Sunday-morning Classic Movies series and now Wildwood‘s Wednesday-night screenings at The Broad.  There’s usually only one or two now-or-never selections in any given month here, which is much more manageable than the nonstop deluge of rare 35mm prints that flood cities like Chicago & NYC.  Having a large portion of those screenings recently relocate to The Broad has made it even more manageable for me personally, since it’s the theater closest to my home.  So, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching older releases at my neighborhood cinema, but not too much time.  Except for the rare occasions when I have to choose between two once-in-a-lifetime screenings on opposite sides of town, I’m mostly unbothered, moisturized, happy, in my lane, focused, flourishing.

As a result, I’ve racked up a few short-form reviews of older movies I happened to catch at The Broad in recent weeks.  All three movies happen to be about rebellious young women’s lives as social outcasts, which likely says less about the kinds of films being programmed around town than it says about the kinds of films that motivate me to leave the couch.  Here they are in all their grimy, leather-jacketed glory (listed in the order that I watched them).

Vagabond (1985)

Second only to Alfred Hitchcock’s routine appearances in Prytania’s Classic Movies program, Agnès Varda has got to be the most frequently programmed director in town (or at least has been for as long as I’ve been paying attention to such things).  Since 2018, I’ve seen Le Bonheur, Faces Places, The Gleaners & I, and Cléo from 5 to 7 at local specialty screenings, and I even missed one of Jane B.  It’s an incredible string of luck that’s made me reluctant to catch up with Varda’s most iconic titles at home, with the assumption that they’ll eventually play in a proper theater if I’m patient enough to wait.  That spoiled brat entitlement recently paid off when Wildwood screened the 1985 drama Vagabond, one of Varda’s most celebrated post-Cléo triumphs. I immediately understood its reputation as one of her best, since it works equally well as a prequel to her dumpster-diving documentary The Gleaners & I (my personal favorite Varda) and as a crust-punk take on Citizen Kane (many serious critics’ personal favorite by anyone). 

Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a transient young woman named Mona, hitchhiking her way across France with no particular purpose or destination.  Mona loves smoking weed, listening to generic pop radio, and not being hassled to do much else.  We’re introduced to her as a corpse, frozen in a ditch without anyone looking for her or even really knowing who she is.  We get to know her through the posthumous testimonials of people whose lives she drifted through, her aimless story playing out in fractured flashback.  Everyone projects their own dreams, regrets, uses, and prejudices onto her but she was never vulnerable enough with any stranger ever to fully reveal herself, making her just as impossible to pin down in testimonial as Charles Foster Kane.  Only, Kane was defined by the crushing weight of his own ambition, while Mona is defined by her total lack of it.  As she camps on isolated roadsides and squats in abandoned estates, the people around her attempt to parse out the romance of her wandering vs the self-destructive impulse of her “withering.”  It’s essentially unacceptable for her to merely exist, and the world inevitably punishes her for it by abandoning her body in a ditch.

One of the reasons I put off watching this particular Varda film for so long is that its premise sounds so unrelentingly grim.  In truth, Vagabond strikes the same real-life balance between joy & misery that most of Varda’s films achieve; it just starts with tragedy instead of saving it for a last-minute shock.  Even Mona’s death has an absurdist humor to it in the end, as it results from the joyous carnival celebrations of a local community who isn’t aware how vulnerable she is to their drunken shenanigans.  As doomed as she is from the start and as unknowable as she remains to everyone she meets, Mona is a loveable, recognizable kind of rebel.  Varda might mock the people who project their own psychological hangups onto the character’s blank canvas, but she includes herself and her audience in that indictment.  By the end you really feel like you know Mona, especially if you’ve ever smelled the particular sweet-yeast/old-mold stench crusties tend to cultivate in their unwashed denim.  You don’t know her, though.  No one possibly could.

Rebel Dykes (2021)

I don’t know that Patois Film Fest‘s screening of the 2021 documentary Rebel Dykes technically counts as repertory, since it might very well have been the film’s local premiere.  I’ve been waiting to see this low-budget, D.I.Y. punk doc for years, but it seemingly never landed official distribution outside its initial festival run.  It was a perfect fit for Patois programmers’ focus on political activism, though, since it’s specifically about the anti-assimilationist queer politics of post-punk lesbian leather bars in 1980s London.  Ostracized both by internal debates over whether S&M & pornography were acceptable feminist practices and by external governmental oppression in Thatcher’s UK, the heavy-leather lesbians of the era formed a tight community initially mobilized by lust but eventually galvanized into political fury – mostly by necessity.  A lot of them are still around to tell the tale, too (a rare luxury for 1980s urban queer communities), including producer Siobhan Fahey, who’s interviewed among her friends as a first-hand witness to the scene.

Rebel Dykes has all the hallmarks of a self-indulgent documentary in which talking heads wax nostalgic about the “You had to be there” glory days, but it’s thankfully working with a deep archive of vintage material from the era that helps illustrate the scene’s historical importance.  That archive is especially helped by its subjects recalling a time when home video camcorders were first becoming affordable, giving a lot of the vintage footage the feel of grimy video art and, more practically, homemade pornography.  The animated interstitials that stitch those clips together are a lot less visually impressive, but there is a kind of homemade charm to them as well, as if a bored teenage punk made their own Flash Animation versions of Love & Rockets comic book covers.  Mostly, though, Rebel Dykes‘s nostalgia is sidestepped through its usefulness as a modern political motivator.  It was a perfect selection for the activism angle of the Patois program, as it got a rowdy crowd amped up to either throw some bricks through some government windows or to throw some BDSM sex parties with their friends – whichever is more politically expedient.

Out of the Blue (1980)

Appropriately enough, Wildwood also recently screened Dennis Hopper’s teen-punk precursor to Vagabond—1980’s Out of the Blue—which likewise features an aimless, denim & leather-clad rebel whose most prized possession is her portable radio.  Linda Manz stars as an Elvis & punk obsessed brat who rebels against her eternal car-crash homelife by running away from home and mimicking the destructive, hedonistic behaviors of the drug-addict grownups around her.  Meanwhile, Hopper rebels with equal gusto against every studio exec who ever gave him a chance, combining the ecstatic antisocial freedoms of Easy Rider with the ecstatic career-torching incoherence of The Last Movie to deliver the least commercial project of his notoriously chaotic stint as a New Hollywood auteur.  Belligerent, sloppy, brilliant – Out of the Blue had me laughing and holding back tears throughout, often simultaneously.

Almost all of the credit for the movie’s power belongs to Manz, of course, whose lead performance anchors Hopper’s messy narrative style in the exact way her voiceover narration anchored Malick’s in Days of Heaven.  Her thick New Yawka felt out of place in that Americana period piece, but it’s perfectly suited to her character here, since she’s essentially auditioning to become the fifth Ramone.  Manz’s dialogue mostly consists of provocative catchphrases like “Elvis!”, “Punk rock!”, “Kill hippies!”, “Subvert normality!” and “I hate men!”, all of which she either delivers in confrontational shouts at the dysfunctional adults around her or in mumbled private reassurances to herself.  She’s a teenage thumbsucker who loves her teddy bear, but she’s eager to break out of her addiction-rotted home to live the full Fabulous Stains punk rock fantasy on the road, a volatile combo of innocence & bravado.  The result of that combination is inevitably bleak, but she’s explosively entertaining & surprisingly funny on her journey to self-destruction.

Out of the Blue is the total Rebel Girl package.  It’s got the oddly joyful nihilism of Vagabond, the take-no-shit toughness of Rebel Dykes, and a special one-of-a-kind teen rebel quality that’s only ever been credibly brought to the screen by Linda Manz (give or take a Natasha Lyonne, who is partially credited for fostering the film’s recent digital restoration).  It’s also got one of hell of a theme song in that titular Neil Young track, which helps add instant emotional impact to Hopper’s aggressively abject, abrasive imagery.

-Brandon Ledet