A French musical with a powerful feminist message - too bad the music's not so great

Agnes Varda's 1977 film, One Sings, the Other Doesn't, is more conventional in narrative structure than her earlier works - a tale of two women and the development of their friendship over time as they lead, for the most part, entirely separate lives, communicating mostly by post card. The movie has the easy flow of a road movie, but relatively little drama, which is OK, it makes the film feel more real and credible: These two women, stage-name Pomme ("apple," the singer; can't remember her birth name) and Suzette, could b like anyone most of us know, or at least knew of back in the 1970s. The film is of course a powerful statement on feminism, rare in commercial films of the era, and it's also a movie musical, with many of the scenes punctuated by songs composed and sung by Pomme and her backup group, The Orchids, as they tour the French countryside giving performances in small town squares (the troubadours reminded a little of Wim Wenders's Wrong Turn and Bergman's Seventh Seal). If only the songs were better! Their heart is always in the right place, but none is memorable (for some reason French popular music has never been adopted by American listeners); the Orchids sound vaguely like the Indigo Girls, but the IGs are much, much better; wondering here is Varda was influenced by her the musicals of her husband, Jacques Demy, but with a political/feminist message? In any event, the story line, essentially, is that the two women meet when Pomme is teenage student, and Suzette a young mother; S's husband commits suicide and P tries to help her with some funds to pay for an abortion in Switzerland. Nothing works out, and the women part ways - but both end up working actively on women's reproductive rights. They cross paths some 5 or so years later and initiate their correspondence, and eventually some visits. Pomme marries an Iranian man, and things start off well, but when they move to Iran (shot, I think, in a Paris suburb!) she feels oppressed, of course, and returns to France to pursue her singing career. Suzette, meanwhile establishes a women's health clinic and raises her two children; over time, the daughter becomes a more leftist-feminist than Mom, which shows that each generation pushes the previous. The movie is unflinching about the rights of women: the need for access to good health care and to the right to abort a pregnancy; the need to rectify legal inequalities about property and inheritance (who can forget Marlon Brando's boasts about the "Napoleonic Code" in Streetcar?). All told, a touch story which, despite some longueurs, is worth staying with till the end - it's not as creative or groundbreaking as some earlier Varda films but it carries a message and it carries its weight.