Who is the ultimate authority after a film has been made? Is it the general public, who its often intended to entertain, or the critics that make it their professional duty to determine whether it is a success or a failure, or the filmmaker, who looks back at a specific work and decides whether they achieved what they set out to do when making the film? It’s a debate that often doesn’t have a clear resolution, even if the general perception is that the director normally provides the most insight, on the sole virtue that their vision was ultimately what resulted in the film. However, if we adopt this line of reasoning, Les Créatures would be considered one of the worst films of the 1960s, purely because Agnès Varda was unimpressed with the work, and repurposed it decades later into one of her most famous artworks, “Ma Cabane de l’Échec”, or her “Shack of Failures”, where the stock from this film was used to build a structure that gave purpose to what ultimately she believed to be an unsuccessful piece. However, what isn’t taken into account is that despite not reaching the magnificent heights of some of her other work, Les Créatures is nonetheless a fascinating film from a director who was never content to align herself with one style or set of conventions – everything Varda made was done for the sole purpose of providing her with the satiation to explore her innumerable curiosities. Compensating for some bewildering narrative choices and questionable methods in its construction with an ambition that can match nearly anything the filmmaker had done throughout her career, Les Créatures has a fascinating approach to a set of questions that we didn’t know we needed to know the answers to had it not been for Varda’s immense fascination with the subject matter – whatever that may be.

Edgar Piccoli (Michel Piccoli) is a hardworking author who is currently trying to finish his latest novel, a science-fiction romance. Growing tired of the distractions of the city, he sets off with his heavily-pregnant wife, Mylène (Catherine Deneuve) to a remote village in an undisclosed region of Europe, where he hopes to continue working on his book and finishing the story. However, en route to their destination, the couple finds themselves in a car accident, which gives Edgar an enormous scar down his forward and renders Mylène mute. However, these injuries don’t impact them all that much, as they eventually find their way to the rural castle that they’ll be calling their home for an indefinite amount of time, and immerse themselves in a more pastoral life, surrounded by rural sensibilities that are quite refreshing in contrast to the more insincere nature of city life. Eventually, they become far too familiar with the eccentric residents of the town, who are clearly apprehensive to these visitors, showing nothing but hostility and aggression to them as they try and assimilate into their culture. Edgar finds himself being so influenced by the residents of his new environment, he begins to structure his novel around them, basing his story off the bizarre events he consistently finds himself becoming a part of. Whether being assaulted by a pair of overzealous bed-sheet salesman, or beating a chef with a dead cat, he encounters an immense amount of material to insert into his novel, which becomes a wide tableau of cultural idiosyncrasy. It all culminates in the realization that this town’s behaviour is not without reason – there’s a sinister force that is controlling their lives, and dictating the course of events, as part of a twisted game of fate, which proves that reality is often stranger than fiction

Varda’s films nearly always have a very clear intention, as represented in the thematic through-line that persists throughout them, even when she’s at her most experimental. Les Créatures is one of her most audacious early films, a daring metafictional piece that slightly predates postmodernism, which was built on this brand of existential absurdity. Looking at the narrow boundaries between fact and fiction, the director ventures into the idea of reality and its unimpeachable volatility, especially when focusing on the life of an artist, working feverishly to create his next masterpiece, while becoming increasingly ensconced in the situation surrounding it. Les Créatures is one of the pioneering works that look at the depths of art and its impact on of the artist, becoming part of him to the point where the audience, much like the subject himself, is unable to separate the reality around him to the work he’s created. Les Créatures looks directly at the varying intersections between a writer and the world he constructs from only words, and where his surrounding begin to impinge upon his creation, ultimately resulting in a failure to differentiate between what is actually authentic, and what is just the folly of an artist with an over-active imagination. Varda launches us into this challenging story by presenting us with an atmosphere that puts us in a permanent dreamlike state. Much of Varda’s earlier work seems detached from reality, most likely a factor in her fascinating combination of documentary footage with components constructed for the film. Les Créatures is a film that inarguably doesn’t make much sense at the outset – a series of jumbled moments, vignettes derived from a promising idea, which then ultimately converge into a compelling postmodern dark comedy that is as fragmented and chaotic as a feverish dream, which only someone with the sheer audacity as Varda could have conveyed with such precision and authenticity, rather than the more self-obsessed ruminations of some of her artistic counterparts at the time.

Les Créatures is led by two French actors who defined the 1960s, consistently doing fascinating work that required much more from them than some of their contemporaries. Michel Piccoli leads the film as Edgar Piccoli, a frantic writer caught between deep existential quandaries and bizarre fantastical ravings, and who has to find a fair middle-ground to continue his novel, which is enveloping much of his time, necessitating a trip to the countryside, where he hopes to work in peace, away from the bustling city. Piccoli was always exceptional at playing these incredibly intelligent individuals who can either be entirely charming (such as his work in The Young Girls of Rochefort) or harbour sinister tendencies that put them at odds with those that are purer (such as in the case of Belle de Jour). Much like these films, Piccoli works with Catherine Deneuve, one of cinema’s most magnetic stars, an incredibly charismatic actress who could extract any emotion from even the most paltry of material. In playing the character of Mylène, who is rendered mute in the opening moments of the film, Deneuve has the monumental challenge of giving nuance to a woman whose voice was quite literally taken away in a film that focuses its attention on a male protagonist, while she sits silently in despair. Varda was not myopic enough to simply reduce Deneuve to an object of desire, but rather uses her striking appearance and expressivity as a means of deriving a complex discourse on the character’s own state, and how she exists as a tool in the life of a man whose entire career is propelled by his imagination – the question of whether Mylène was even really mute, or rather just rendered inconsequential by a man who saw her as nothing other than someone to come home to, pervades throughout Les Créatures and has potential to lead into quite a compelling discussion on gender roles and identity in post-war European society.

However, this is where Les Créatures does tend to falter in unfortunate ways – the idea of potential lingers heavily over this film but is ultimately never realized more than a few interesting ideas occurring throughout the film. The film has many shortcomings, no less since Varda was attempting something that had more promise than it did premise. She seems to be surrendering to the expectations of her contemporaries in the Nouvelle Vague in trying to make a film that focuses on the inner machinations of a tortured artist, without actually saying all that much about him or the society in which the story is indicting. It often seems to either be plodding along at a leisurely pace or being far too rapid to make any coherent sense, with a disconnect occurring between the interesting story and the lacklustre execution. It isn’t enough to squander the goodwill of the film as a whole, but it does distract from what could’ve been a truly subversive masterpiece, a daring social odyssey that traverses time and space and presents us with something simultaneously detached from reality but still quintessentially human. It executes its ideas with a certain intensity that would have worked had the ideas contained within been subjected to more active engagement, rather than the scattershot bundle of neuroses with which Varda puts together the film.

Les Créatures simply doesn’t have the heart or sincerity with which Varda made her other films, and its cold execution and more distant narrative style may be appealing to those with an interest in overly-cerebral storytelling, but for someone who has always found ambitious stories through engaging with the most simple subject matter, Les Créatures is a bit of a disappointment in Varda’s otherwise stellar career. At the very least, we can rest in ease knowing that the director was well-aware of the flaws, and turned them into something more worthwhile. However, this doesn’t distract from the raw brilliance that she brings to this film in terms of how it is still an outlier in a cinematic landscape populated by less-than-ideal explorations of individuality, which Varda overcomes with a dedicated approach to a more complex set of ideas that may not always be particularly easy to convey without encountering some kind of challenges. Les Créatures is a fascinating specimen of a film, a quietly intense character-driven piece that samples liberally from many genres, including darkly comical satire, soaring romance and complex science fiction, infusing many of its interesting philosophical ideas with a subversive kind of existentialism. Varda may have made something of a failure with this film, but the interesting ideas contained within, and the energetic style that prevents it from catatonic tedium qualify it as a noble, if not highly flawed, attempt at forward-thinking storytelling, which is sufficient in making this a very interesting work from one of the most ambitious filmmakers of her generation.