Review of Women Reply

"Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe" is a French French-language short film from 1975, so this one is almost 45 years old, maybe over depending on when you read this review. It only runs for sligthly under 8 minutes, so this is a really long title for a fairly short movie. The literal translation would mean something along the lines of "Women's Answer: Our Body, our gender". But the official English-language international title is simply "Women Reply". This film is part of a series of films on women and probably the most known today, which mostly has to do with the fact that behind the camera here was Agnès Varda, a female filmmaker who died not too long ago around the age of 90. Now her work here is not really about women being discriminated in the job world, but really very close to gender in a biological sense too. We see a baby girl early on and later on naked women on several occasions. I think the idea behind this film is good because honestly there was so much discrimination still in the 1970s, but there isn't really today anymore, even if all kinds of social justice warriors and white knight want you to think otherwise. But back then, there was. Sadly, the execution here is very shoddy and I will give you a few example why I don't think this film came even close to achieving what it should have. The main problem is that it depicts men as evil. Every man basically. They need to stop seeing women as humans whose only purpose to satisfy men. Now that is really absurd. There may have been many men who thought so, but in fact there were also so many caring husbands and fathers who do not deserve one bit of this categorization. The moment when they say that men who don't have kids should not be seen negatively either is very correct, but it is still projecting. And yeah moments when we have one woman say she wants kids and the one next to her say she doesn't, it's not the most creative part to be honest, especially in terms of writing. All in all, this is definitely a feminist film and in its attempts to move forward in terms of gender equality, it is crossing the mark too often and not managing to stay on the fine line between too careful and way over-the-top. The latter description fits this film very well on several occasions and you will recognize these occasions when you see then if you decide to watch it. It is still somewhat interesting from the perspective of life in the 1970s at times, so the film is not a complete failure, but at times, it comes really close to. It is certainly closer to being a failure than to being a good watch, but overall I would categorized it as a weak movie. Don't watch unless you are a Varda completionist.