Viva Varda

French film icon Agnès Varda takes
a look back at her life with eccentric
self-portrait Les Plages d’Agnès

REFLECTIVE REVERIE: Les Plages d’Agnès

by MALCOLM FRASER

Agnès Varda is an international cinematic treasure, the kind of eccentric artist you see less and less of in the corporatized film world. Now 80, she boasts a filmography that began before the French New Wave and includes everything from archetypal early-’60s nuggets like Cléo de 5 à 7, to documentaries on the Vietnam War and the Black Panthers, to the recent oddball doc The Gleaners and I. With Les Plages d’Agnès, she takes a typically idiosyncratic look back at her own life and career.

The film takes us through her World War II childhood, her early training as a photographer, her involvement with Godard, Resnais and the other New Wave directors, her marriage to iconic French director Jacques Demy, her family life with two kids, her time spent in California in the late ’60s, her liberating discovery of hand-held video, and on to today, which finds her making autobiographical docs and gallery installations. She touches on these stages in a non-linear and highly personal fashion, the structure evoking a lazy reverie of reflection on a life well lived.

With Demy and other friends and collaborators passed on, and the years of footage seeing her transform from cute young girl to middle-aged mom to gnarled, gnomic old lady, her signature bowl cut now punk-grandma purple flecked with white, the film is weighted with mortality and the passing of time. It’s also a reminder of a cinema culture that doesn’t really exist anymore, a time when experimentation and exploration were considered artistic virtues, not contemptible self-indulgences.

And yet for all its melancholy, the film is also very light. Varda comes across as a playful, even goofy artist (dressing up as a giant potato to promote one of her installations is only the most obvious example) with enough perspective to be grateful for her successes and nonchalant about her failures. Filling the film with cheap video effects and peculiar choices of structure and exposition, she clearly feels that she’s old enough to do whatever she wants.

Needless to say, the film is heavily skewed towards existing Varda fans. But anyone interested in her legendary generation of French filmmakers will find a lot to enjoy.

LES PLAGES D’AGNÈS OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, MARCH 13