One Hundred and One Nights

One Hundred and One Nights (Les Cent et Une Nuits, 1995), directed by Agnès Varda, is a French comedy-fantasy you can watch online on iFILM — made for the centennial of cinema. Michel Piccoli plays Simon Cinema, a hundred-year-old film obsessive living in a château filled floor to ceiling with posters, reels and photographs. His memory is failing, so he hires a young student named Camille to tell him film stories, one night at a time.

Camille comes with an ulterior motive. Her friend Mika — an aspiring director who's broke — wants to steal the old man's archive and sell it to fund his debut. What they didn't count on: Simon's resourcefulness. And the steady stream of celebrity drop-ins — Marcello Mastroianni as Simon himself, Gérard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Robert De Niro, Alain Delon, Harrison Ford — each showing up for a scene or two, as if all of film history lives just around the corner.

Varda made this as a centenary love letter: part comedy, part elegy, almost entirely about mood. The plot is barely the point. Stream One Hundred and One Nights (1995) online on iFILM.