Lions Love ( . . . and Lies)

“The pressures here in Hollywood are so great, from all the dead people,” opines Andy Warhol superstar Viva in Agnès Varda’s experimental feature, shot in Los Angeles in 1968. The external pressures on our heroine at first seem to be few. Drifting naked in the pool, attended by swains Jim Rado and Jerry Ragni (the writers/singers of Hair), she has little more to do than recite pop aphorisms. But the atmosphere of hippie bliss is disrupted when the trio’s houseguest, filmmaker Shirley Clarke, arrives. Bracketed by performances of Michael McClure’s The Beard—with cameos by Eddie Constantine and Peter Bogdanovich, among others—Lions Love is a deliberately decadent riff on fantasy, immaturity, and violence: American culture, 1968.