The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘The Virgin of Pessac’ (1968), ‘The Virgin of Pessac 79’ (1979)
Stream them on the Criterion Channel.
Jean Eustache, the French director best known for “The Mother and the Whore” (1973), directed two documentaries capturing an antediluvian ritual in his hometown. Every year, following instructions from a deceased resident’s 1896 will, officials in Pessac, France, selected a young woman to be crowned as the municipality’s rosière. That word is left untranslated in the subtitles, but the role amounts to being Pessac’s “rose”: The rosière gets paraded around with a lot of pomp and circumstance as her fellow townspeople treat her like a mascot — a woman they can objectify as part of their birthright. The main criterion for selection? Moral virtue. Eustache filmed the 1968 and 1979 competitions, if “competition” is the mot juste for a contest whose participants appear to have little say in taking part.
By prescription, the judges consist of Pessac’s mayor, the parish priest, a justice of the peace and several others, including, “preferably,” a gaggle of winegrowers’ wives. The nomination process essentially officializes gossip, as various local busybodies suggest women based on hearsay about them and their families. Candidates must have been born in Pessac and must be, per the recitations of the rules, “of nubile age.” The 1968 mayor doesn’t seem too concerned about saying cringeworthy things. “Those who film the ceremony have promised to delete anything embarrassing,” he says, referring to Eustache’s team. But later, he expresses delight at the winner’s photogenicity: “Even though we didn’t choose according to looks, I’m glad she’s so cute. It will be good for TV.”
It is not clear what Eustache might have held back. “The Virgin of Pessac” is a good illustration of Frederick Wiseman’s frequent assertion that camera subjects don’t realize how they look to an observer. Until a priest mentions the unrest of May 1968 — a touchstone in Eustache’s work — “The Virgin of Pessac” could almost pass for something shot in the late 19th century.
By the time of “The Virgin of Pessac 79,” the townspeople, while still upbeat, look marginally more mortified at carrying on the tradition, and they have relaxed some of the rules. (It’s become harder to find winegrowers’ wives, for one thing.) There are whispers of past rosières who may not actually have been chaste. Who could designate the virgin of Pessac in a post-“Mother and the Whore” era?
‘The Imposter’ (2012)
Stream it on Freevee, Kanopy, Peacock, Pluto and Tubi. Rent it on Apple TV, Fandango at Home and Google Play.
Late in “The Imposter,” we hear about a woman who passed two polygraph tests before flunking the third. The director Bart Layton’s documentary creates a kind of lie-detector test for the viewer. You can’t trust anyone in this movie, not even the filmmaker.
Owing a considerable conceptual and aesthetic debt to Errol Morris, “The Imposter” centers on an infamous real-life impersonation case. In 1997, the title subject, a French-born man named Frédéric Bourdin, passed himself off as Nicholas Barclay, a San Antonio teenager who had gone missing three years earlier. At 23, Bourdin was clearly older than Barclay would have been. He had a French accent and several physical dissimilarities with the boy he was claiming to be. Nevertheless, he lucked into enough bureaucratic incompetence to make his way from Spain to Texas, and Barclay’s family welcomed him into their home. Did they believe him? Were they deceiving themselves?
“The Imposter” tells this story from multiple points of view. Bourdin, talking head-on to the camera, describes the cleverness of his ruse step by step. At times even he appears incredulous at his success — but naturally, everything he says ought to be regarded with great skepticism. In some ways, the bigger mysteries involve Beverly, Nicholas’s mother, Carey Gibson, his half sister, who are among the interviewees. Bourdin can describe the logistics of making phone calls and disguising himself physically, but Layton is also interested in penetrating the more abstract headspaces of Nicholas’s apparently duped relatives. The filmmaker comes to no firm conclusions, and by the end of the movie his sympathies seem to lie with a colorful private investigator who was working for “Hard Copy” — a sleuth who is presented, fairly or not, as having Bourdin’s number when authorities shrugged.
Layton’s use of re-enactments (some of which feature multiple Bourdins) may be a bit of a cliché, but it adds to the sense that nothing onscreen is stable.
‘A Night of Knowing Nothing’ (2021)
Stream it on the Criterion Channel. Rent it on Apple TV and Google Play.
It is not strictly accurate to call “A Night of Knowing Nothing” a documentary: This debut feature from Payal Kapadia, whose second feature will screen in competition at Cannes next month, mingles modes so freely that she has described it as “a long dream.” Visually, much of it consists of footage shot by Kapadia, her cinematographer and her friends, along with home movies and other archival material.
The voice-over, though, is fiction: The main narration comes from invented letters supposedly found at the Film and Television Institute of India, which Kapadia herself attended; their author is an imaginary student known simply as L. The letters are to the young man she loves, and who wanted to marry her. But his parents have forbidden him from seeing her because she comes from a lower caste. The dramatized narration folds in real-world events and issues: a strike by the institute’s students to oppose what they saw as the political appointment of a new chairman; the suicide of a Dalit student — a student from a group once known as “untouchables” — whose death led to protests in India; outrage at a citizenship law that opponents saw as anti-Muslim; and the general atmosphere of suppression under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The free-flowing structure makes “A Night of Knowing Nothing” tough to reduce to a concise description, and the movie is easier to follow on a repeat viewing than the first time through. But a sense of tumult is integral to Kapadia’s design. The film is in large measure a celebration of student activism and mobilization. Actual protests are shown throughout, as both L and the director find their political voices. “Time has put us in a certain place,” a man says at the end, referring to the film students’ movement, adding that they reacted in the way that they could.
