Cinéma. Simts un viena nakts / Cinéma. Сто и одна ночь кино / Cinéma. One hundred and one nights

Cinéma. One Hundred and One Nights  

Les cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma

France, 1995, 105 min

Director: Agnès Varda

Is it possible to bring together in one film Michel Piccoli and Marcello Mastroianni, Alain Delon and Catherine Deneuve, Robert De Niro and Gina Lollobrigida, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anouk Aimée, Gérard Depardieu and Jeanne Moreau, Harrison Ford and Hanna Schygulla – and many, many, many other beloved and iconic actors?

It is possible if the film is made to celebrate the centenary of cinema, and the director is the legendary Agnès Varda! Let us welcome them all and give them their due homage!

A celebration of cinema’s centennial, One Hundred and One Nights finds Agnès Varda at her most playful. It is also perhaps her unlikeliest project: a star-studded comic fantasy with an extravagant sense of style and an adoring but slightly off-kilter perspective on the magic of filmmaking.

French New Wave icon Michel Piccoli is a mysterious aging impresario named Simon Cinéma who has hired a young film student, Camille, to simply sit with him at his mansion and talk about movies. Skeptical yet increasingly enchanted, Camille bears witness to cinema itself coming to life, allowing Varda to wittily integrate a mind-boggling parade of appearances by screen legends (Catherine Deneuve, Marcello Mastroianni, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anouk Aimée, Robert De Niro, and many others), and attest to the vigorous health of the movies at the close of the twentieth century.

  Monsieur Cinema, a hundred years old, lives alone in a large villa. His memories fade away, so he engages a young woman to tell him stories about all the movies ever made. Also a line of movie stars comes to visit him giving him back the pleasure of life - but amongst them there are also some young students only striving after his money for the realization of their film projects. The two stories - Monsieur Cinema’s and the young people’s life - are told in parallel until they come together in the end when the old man plays a role in the film made by the students.

Original Language: French

Subtitles: English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvb8B7w1-Zk