“I’m playing the role of a little
old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story. And yet it’s
others I’m interested in, others I like to film.” So begins the
autobiographical documentary Beaches of Agnès with the words spoken by
director Agnès Varda herself, on the cusp of turning 80 years old, over images
of her walking barefoot on a beach. And as if to demonstrate that she’s more
interested in filming others, the very next sequence finds her and her crew
setting up a group of mirrors on the beach (a simple and not belabored metaphor
for looking back, reflecting on her life and work), and before she says
anything about herself she’s introducing her crew in spoken “credits” over their
reflections in mirrors. But after this, she begins to set up and review
photographs of herself as a young girl, talking about time spent visiting
beaches with her family. And then we’re off on a chronological tour of her life
in a fairly normal documentary fashion. That is, we would be if Varda could
ever make a fairly normal documentary.
She receives word that the new
owners of a house she use to live in would allow her to come visit and film in
the home, but as quickly as she’s there talking about her childhood, she’s off on
a tangent again, digressing into a detour that indulges her curiosity about the
new owner’s train collection, her interest in him as a person and what
interests and compels him overriding the need to tell her own story. And so it
goes - the film revisits periods of her life and digresses repeatedly into
eddies and detours about other things as they strike her, sometimes for only a
shot or two with a comment, sometimes for a short sequence before looping back
to her own story (and work). But we still get plenty of Agnès - her youth
during wartime, reflections on her parents and siblings, and before long, her
films themselves. And Jacques Demy - especially Jacques Demy.
Varda started work as a professional
photographer before she decided to make films - as she notes: “without
experience, without having been an assistant before, without having gone to
film school” - beginning with the 1954 film La Pointe Courte, an assured debut that shows a strong eye
for composition that is one of the hallmarks of her work. That film
formalizes the discursive mode that would later be more thoroughly integrated
in her work by separating the film’s documentary approach to showing a fishing
community in southeastern France and the narrative story of two lovers within that
community. It flip-flops between narrative and the documentary, but these two
modes would be intertwined throughout her career, with her documentaries often
featuring staged sequences and humorous asides (as in the charming Uncle Yanco, a film about her eccentric
uncle she meets living in the U.S., or in a whimsical interlude in Beaches
of Agnès itself, where she
recreates her film company's office outside and has her co-workers doing their
jobs on a sandy beach recreated on the street), and her narrative films
almost always featuring the realistic digressions and sidetracks like those
noted above. The film is also considered a precursor to the French New Wave
cinema of the early 60s, five years before either Godard or Truffaut had
features out.
Early on as the New Wave was bubbling up, Varda met Jacques Demy
in 1958; they married a year later and, despite ups and downs, separations and
reconciliations, remained married until his death in 1990. Their lives are
intertwined personally, and professionally with Varda directing Demy's
autobiographical final script Jacquot de
Nantes, completing the filming only weeks before Demy's passing. Since his
death, Varda has largely worked in documentary, circling often around her own
life and Demy's, with 1993's The Young
Girls Turn 25 a touchback to Demy's earlier The Young Girls of Rochefort and 1995's The World of Jacques Demy a direct tribute to his works. After
this, Varda began to look to her own life and experience for documentary
material - she'd done it before, with Uncle
Yanco and others, and in Documenteur,
a narrative film reflecting on events of her own life and separation from Demy
while in the States.
And so Beaches of Agnès looks to sum up more than five decades of filmmaking from this unique
director, who blurred the line between documentary and fiction to the point
where it doesn't matter. She talks about many of her films - from the
award-winning New Wave classic Cléo from 5 to 7, to her feminist mid-70s
masterpiece One Sings, the Other Doesn't (due out from Criterion in
May), to her terrific late-period documentary The Gleaners and I - but
mostly reflects on the importance of her family, her many friendships and
artistic acquaintances, her 80th birthday, and her life with Jacques Demy,
circling back over and over to the most important relationship in her life, and
ultimately learning to accept his passing and that of other friends she'd known
over time. The feel of the work is valedictory, as though Varda was making her
swan song, and in doing so talking about her work but mainly thinking about
others, always her modus operandi. It's touching, beautifully shot and
conceived and, yes, discursive. There are those who find her meanderings and
whimsy a touch light, but I find her interest in others and her way of
presenting herself utterly winning. And though this feels like a final
film that she made at 80 years old, she's made some short works since its
release and in 2017 released the excellent, Academy Award-nominated Faces
Places just after she turned 89. And now IMDB lists a new documentary, Varda by Agnès, which received its first
release only weeks ago, and described as "an unpredictable documentary
from a fascinating storyteller" - sounds like she's still going strong as
she moves past 90.
-
Patrick Brown
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