Documenteur 
Opening with the same image that closes Mur murs, Documenteur is considered Varda’s second film in the unofficial diptych, abutting her iridescent document of Los Angeles’s vibrant murals and the artists who made them. Casting her own son Mathieu to play the child of wandering heroine Emilie (played by Sabine Mamou, who also edited both films and later cut The Beaches of Agnès (2008)), Varda follows the mother-son duo on their quest for housing in a quiet, pensive work that would anticipate her interest in seekers as evidenced in her later films Vagabond (1985) and The Gleaners and I (2000).  

Play It As It Lays  
Based on Joan Didion’s novel of the same name, Frank Perry’s filmed version was adapted by the novel’s author with the help of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Depicting a lifestyle of soulless mansion pool parties and arid desert escapes, it’s Tuesday Weld's and Anthony Perkins’s empathic performances within this Lost Angeles landscape that give this fiercely independent film its strange shape and deep pathos. Didion was allegedly a friend of Varda when each was alive; as pointed out by filmmaker and writer Courtney Stephens in a 2022 Film Comment newsletter, “Varda’s astringent, lyrical fiction film Documenteur….also feels distinctly Didionesque.”