I just can’t see Jean-Luc Godard walking around dressed as a potato as Agnès Varda does in her new documentary, The Beaches of Agnès (Les Plages d’Agnès); I mean, he won’t even take off those dark glasses most of the time.
The beaches in the title refer to the primary location where Varda creates her unique work in this biography through art. In the process of exploring the invention of her photographs, films, and art installations over the years, her own life takes shape. Varda achieves her goal of assembling the puzzle of her mind on film. By the end, she has proven her opening hypothesis that if you opened people up, you would find landscapes. In fact, this is just what she has done—used film to stretch her life onto the wings of a movie screen. If this metaphor strikes you as outlandish, then you probably won’t enjoy the film.
Varda is associated with two seminal French film movements. She is often considered the lady of French New Wave, or La Nouvelle Vague, which was heavily influenced by Italian Neorealism and included François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, most of whom had worked as critics for the movie magazine Cahiers du cinema under famed critic André Bazin; yet she was actually more involved with the Left Bank Cinema, or Rive Gauche, which included filmmakers Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Cayrol and Henri Colpi.
The Beaches of Agnès is like an artistic ratio problem: film into reality: reality into film and life into art: art into life; her films are documentary-like and her documentaries are film-like. She inverts the story of her life, changes it, and makes it into a movie. She then invests this story (the art she has made, the artists she has worked with and been inspired by, the people she has loved) with her peculiar ethos that is wildly imaginative and more than a little eccentric.
Varda’s work resonates oddly, as though a lighthearted child with a good sense of humor mated with a darker surrealist. This hybrid is most apparent in her footage of two heads covered in sheets kissing that elicited equal amounts of discomfort and laughter from the audience. A similarly unsettling yet hypnotic later shot shows her lying beneath a stretch of sand on a beach that is covered by a tarp, as though she were alone inside the belly of a whale. It’s in shots like these, that flash her inner life on the screen for a moment, that we really understand why reality has always meant little to her—her internal world is more interesting.
Varda’s wonder and awe at the world around her brings you back to a time where every ant and blade of grass was a revelation. It is only when she shows us an image that gestures towards a melancholy incident in her life—being separated from her childhood home by war or losing her husband, fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy, to AIDS--that we realize that her cheerfulness and childlike perspective are the conscious decisions of a very brave woman.
The question at the heart of The Beaches of Agnes is how we reconstitute memory and how art plays into this. As a result, the most poignant image of all is Varda as both wife and artist making a documentary on her dying husband. She explains how, as a filmmaker, the only thing she could do while he was dying was document the details of Demy very closely (at which point the white of each of his individual hairs takes over the screen in one of the few shots that has truly choked me up in a movie theater in quite awhile), in order to show him dying, but still alive.
Varda is at once a hulking figure in the history of cinema and an impish grandmother type who wants to share all her treasures and stories even if you have somewhere to be. This combination is awe inspiring, but takes a bit of patience. Perhaps it’s a good exercise for the younger moviegoer who has become so used to the modern hyper-pacing of film. Put another way: listen to grandma, she is way cooler than your friends.
Just to show how successful she
was at getting into my head, on the way home, I passed a huge, shapeless lump
covered in a tarp and felt fairly certain that Agnès was under there.
--Caroline Hagood
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