The two giants of cinema may have never gotten their final reunion, but in the movies, they did.
, the news that the latter would be devoting an episode to parodying the former took me to the happiest of places. And I’ve been watching the series long enough to know that its ostensible parodies are often more like alternate-universe emulations, immaculately matching the originals’ look and feel with the care of an obsessive acolyte. But even by those standards, “Trouver Frisson” goes the extra mile.
And Ida’s contentious relationship with her longtime cinematic colleague and sometimes friend, played by the Belgian actor Ronald Guttman, is an obvious reference to the place Godard occupies in Varda’sdidn’t turn out to be Varda’s final film—that ended up being 2019’s, a sort of self-curated retrospective of a career that only received its proper reverence in her last years—but it has the feeling of one, not least because one of its subjects is how Varda’s failing eyesight makes it...