Lions Love
Director: Agnès Varda
Writer: Agnès Varda
Cast: Viva, James Rado, Gerome Ragni, Shirley Clarke, Carlos Clarens, Eddie Constantine, Agnès Varda
Seen on: 6.2.2025

Content Note: suicide

Plot:
Viva (Viva), Jim (James Rado) and Jerry (Gerome Ragni) are actors waiting for their big call to Hollywood. They are also a throuple and have just rented a house together where they spend their waiting time. Shirley (Shirley Clarke), a director from New York, moves in with them. She wants to shoot a New York style underground movie with Viva in L.A., but finds it difficult to adjust to the creative terms there.

Lions Love is an often very meta film that is a comment on filmmaking as much as it is a film. It has some truly excellent moments but doesn’t quite come together as much as I had hoped from a film by Varda.

Everybody plays versions of themselves in Lions Love, and this works beautifully, as this already creates a tension between fiction and fact that Varda explores throughout the film. Viva’s longing to be in „a real movie“ for once feels absolutely true but is it Viva the character or Viva the actor speaking?

This is doubled by the fact that it is all about Shirley wanting to make a film with Viva. Shirley Clarke herself is an actual director of the kind of films that Shirley the character is. But the transition does not go smoothly, leading to Shirley the character attempting a suicide that Shirley the actor can’t play because she doesn’t feel that it suits her as a person. So – in probably the most memorable scene of the film – Varda herself (who can be seen holding the camera in various mirrors in the film) takes over and plays Shirley’s suicide.

But Varda doesn’t stop there. She tries to extend all these questions of what is real, how do we make movies, to real life events, in particular the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. As the characters in the film watch the news footage on their own TV, trying to connect, the movie making aspect of the news suddenly comes into play as well. It is here, though, that the film crumbles a little and loses a bit of coherence.

It can make up for that, though, with its sense of humor that is never as present as when the throuple decides to borrow some children to figure out whether they should have some. It does not go well. I loved this scene even though it felt a little out of place overall, speaking again to a lack of focus. This makes Lions Love still worth seeing, but definitely not Varda’s best film.

Summarizing: entertaining for the most part.