An "evocation" of the boyhood of the late French filmmaker Jacques Demy, by his long-time wife and a very dissimilar filmmaker, Agnes Varda. The better you know Demy (some interspersed clips from his films are an inadequate introduction), the more open you will be to the charm and tenderness and pathos of the thing. If you don't know what the New Wave was -- what it grew out of and what it stood for -- you won't get all you might from the evolution, through three separate child actors, of a pre-WWII puppet fan and movie fan into a small-scale entrepreneur (homemade puppet theater, a hand-cranked 8mm projector and a worn Chaplin short) and then into a self-taught experimental filmmaker with a miniature studio in the attic. The visual motif of cranking -- not just the secondhand projector and motion-picture camera, but the sewing machine, the meat grinder in the kitchen, the vise in technical school -- establishes the cinema as a trade in addition to an art. Varda's present contribution to that trade is a labor of love if ever there was one, but the love would seem to have led to a degree of garrulousness, diffuseness, slackness. And the labor part of it includes some dispiritingly lifeless and lightless black-and-white photography -- flat, dull, gray, a far cry from that of Demy's Lola, for example. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.