101 Nights

Made in 1994 and inspired by the centenary of the movies, Agnès Varda's 101 Nightsis a work of unbridled whimsy in which Michel Piccoli plays a near-hundred-year-old director who inhabits a château filled with movie memorabilia. Perturbed by his loss of memory, he employs a film student to stimulate him with chatter on Welles, Buñuel, and Renoir. Varda punctuates their meetings with clips from movie classics and visits from old colleagues (Delon, Mastroianni, Moreau, et al.), but the clips are by the numbers, and the illustrious callers can't do much with the inane script. A waste of talent, 101 Nightscould have used 50 rewrites.