Failure Shack: Les Creatures and the limits of storytelling

Agnes Varda's science fiction tale, Les Creatures, is her only film with an extravagant plot, and it is also the film considered (by others and by herself) to be her great failure. This article argues that these two aspects of the film are related. Les Creatures can be read as a condemnation of a certain kind of unrestrained storytelling, in which an artist's desire for invention displaces any effort to engage with the world. The novelist-hero of Les Creatures cooks up fantasies that share the freewheeling improvisation of some of Varda's other films but lack an ethnographic or observational dimension that would tether them to reality. As a result, his story, and indeed Varda's film, amount to a self-absorbed game-playing that Varda repudiates in spite of its eerie fascination. In this way the film can be seen as a road not taken for Varda, drawing attention to the ways in which her other films hold their fantasies accountable to a shared world, and imagining what they would be like if they didn't.