There’s an enticing Michel Piccoli retrospective coming up at Film Forum, but even that one doesn’t include one of the rarest among the strangest and most wondrous science-fiction films I know, Agnès Varda’s “Les Créatures,” from 1966, the story of a science-fiction writer whose creative arrogance proves disastrous for him and, especially, for his wife (Catherine Deneuve), and who may be inside a novel that he’s writing (or may be hallucinating the novel that he’s going to write). Or rather, it’s among the most wondrous science-fiction films that I don’t know but have anticipated ardently from gleaned clips and descriptions—I’ve never even been aware of a screening of it, but even its barest synopses suggest details of pieced-together phantasmagorical style and its cinematic parodies (she does those deftly—for evidence, see her previous films, “Le Bonheur” and “Cléo from 5 to 7”), as well as its symbolic and practical romantic drama, that make it better than most of the science-fiction films (or, for that matter, films of any sort) that I’ve seen. Another reminder that the canon is largely a matter of availability.
Les Créatures
