Agnes Varda walks backward along a beach at the beginning of her new documentary The Beaches of Agnes (Les Plages d’Agnes). She traipses across the sand, pauses and address the audience: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.”
One of most revered filmmakers in France, the 82-year-old director is known to the world as the auteur behind Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962), Happiness (1965), Vagabond (1985) and The Gleaners and I (2000). Varda’s latest work is an autobiographic portrait narrated by the self-described “little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative,” recounting her life journey that begins on the North Sea beaches of her Belgian childhood.
The filmmaker spent her adolescence during World War II at the Mediterranean port Sete in southern France, where she returned at 26 to make her first movie La Pointe-Courte (1954). Then there is Paris, where Varda joined the New Wave boy’s club and called Jean-Luc Godard,
Alain Resnais and the likes her cinematic brothers.
Despite its autobiographic origins, the film is never a straightforward recording of a bohemian granny reminiscing, neither is it stuffed with excessive facts and information about the artistic luminaries on view. Intimate and buoyant in tone, it feels like an engaging self-portrait that the octogenarian auteur wishes to leave to those close to her to remember her by. Yet Varda doesn’t tell us about her life. She shows how her memories and thoughts shape the cine-autobiography being played in front of us. Locations and people Varda holds precious overflow from the screen, finding their places in her life through cinematic devices including photos, clips from her old films, fantasy sequences and theatrical tableaux.
Sometimes, the filmmaker feels the urge to resurrect the past. Early in the film, she re-creates a moment captured in a family photo of her younger self and a sister playing on the beach and wonders if there is any meaning found in the act of reenactment. She made a similar effort in Jacquot de Nantes (1991), created for her dying director husband Jacques Demy, who succumbed to an AIDS-related illness in 1990. Varda stages moments of Demy’s childhood that appear later as moments in his films. The past and present interact, echo and feed into one another.
The Beaches of Agnes works the same way as the mind works, oscillating among different time frames and easily digressing into reveries. With her elliptical approach to storytelling, Varda plays the charming guide as she “walks backward” through her colorful life. Friends and associates are recalled along the way, and the company the filmmaker keeps is a starry, divergent crowd that includes Jane Birkin, Jean Vilar, Jim Morrison and Harrison Ford. Fellow director Christ Marker appears in the form of a cartoon cat, with a digitally altered voice, who rolls his eyes at the impish Varda. Yet the most heartfelt presence in the film is that of Demy, whose name still brings tears to the director’s eyes.
The film also reveals other sides of Varda, who started out as a still photographer. Her association with the Left Bank group whose members include Marker and Resnais prompted the then-young artist to travel to China in 1957 and Cuba in 1962 where she took thousands of photos. When she moved to Los Angeles with Demy in the 1960s, she filmed the Black Panthers and made films about the social and political movements of the time.
Now in her ninth decade, Varda still strives to find new ways to tell stories and infuses her filmmaking with a sense of liberation. When she was a girl she was impressed by the surrealists, and she roams freely in the several imaginative surrealistic set-ups in The Beaches of Agnes. The scene of trapeze artists performing on a beach is one of her own fantasies brought to life. So is the giant whale made out of tarps inside whose belly Varda sits in to share her story. And there is the sandy beach the director creates in the heart of Paris where the all-women staff at an alfresco production office conduct business in bathing suits.
Varda returns to the beginning of it all in the opening sequence, standing on the shore of the North Sea near Brussels, where she was born. With the aid of a group of film students, the director covers the beach with mirrors of different sizes and shapes. Images of the sky, shoreline, sand and ocean and Varda’s own reflections refract and reflect back on each other, much in the same way memory works.
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