Review: With Varda by Agnès, a Giant of Cinema Looks Inward

The film is, essentially, a lecture, with Varda’s talks from multiple events threading together highlights from her oeuvre.

Varda by Agnes
Photo: Berlinale

Agnès Varda has been directing films continuously since 1955. At one time she was best known for the narrative features she made during the first four decades of her career, but many of those films had a tenuous relationship to fiction, featuring as they do non-professional actors, having filmed exclusively on location, and, in the case of 1962’s Cléo from 5 to 7, taking place in real time. At the turn of the millennium—when Varda was 72—she and feature fiction finally broke up for good, and since then she’s made three celebrated documentaries: The Gleaners and I, The Beaches of Agnès, and Faces Places.

The brilliant, charming, and, frankly, adorable Varda centers herself in these essayistic films, which have cemented her reputation as a cherished icon of international art cinema; there’s even an extended sequence in The Gleaners and I in which the septuagenarian films herself in the mirror with her new digital camcorder. But she exudes such generosity of spirit, and so skillfully bridges the gap between personal and philosophical reflection, that the films have never seemed indulgent. Unfortunately, this changes with her new film, Varda by Agnès, the basis of which is a series of talks the artist delivered at museums and theaters on her work.

Varda by Agnès is essentially a lecture, with Varda’s talks from multiple events threading together highlights from her oeuvre. There are three moments in making art, she says: “inspiration, creation, and sharing.” The structure of her review of major works is informed by this belief, as she shares the underlying inspiration for films like Cléo from 5 to 7 (fear of cancer, the nature of time), details the creative process (including an interview with Sandrine Bonnaire, star of Varda’s Vagabond), and offers her thoughts about the films with us.

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While her other documentaries have often explored the intersection between art and life, Varda by Agnès finds the filmmaker far less physically mobile than a decade ago, and far less able to extend her gaze beyond her own work. During the film, some of her collaborators appear on stage or in archival footage with Varda, and she’s never hesitant to cite and even celebrate their contributions. But Varda by Agnès ends up being little more than a digest edition of the filmmaker’s complete works. Those familiar with her filmography, for example, will get little out of her discussion of shooting La Pointe Courte on location, or of the influence of impressionism on the aesthetics of Le Bonheur.

True, many of the films she discusses are less well-known, and her later museum installations have hardly been knowable if you weren’t at MoMA at the right time. Still, what Varda does here mostly is describe and cite works that exist on their own. Because the other documentaries she’s made are already made up largely of reflections on her own work and methodology, the sections of the film that handle those feel particularly repetitive. It’s a bit odd for Varda to hold forth on how much she loves beaches in Varda by Agnès, given that a decade ago she released a well-known essay film on precisely that topic.

Varda allows herself to go off on tangents, and, ironically, her ancillary thoughts feel a bit less navel-gazing than the film’s main thrust. For one, the story about directing Robert De Niro for one day for her final fiction film, One Hundred and One Nights, should seem an extraneous bit of boasting, but Varda’s bashfully excited tone makes it seem generous; she’s letting us in on the somewhat guilty pleasure she took in landing a major Hollywood star. And whenever she talks about her beloved husband, director Jacques Demy, who died of AIDS in 1990, the film also approaches a kind of “sharing” not borrowed from her previous work.

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Varda by Agnès is somewhat like the handwritten memoirs Varda recounts Demy giving her from his sickbed, an attempt to sum up a life in a few memories. The subtext of the film would then be that, for Varda, her art is her life, and, as suggested by the film’s title, that means it’s been a life she was able to have ownership of. Ultimately hard to begrudge a 90-year-old, particularly such an accomplished one as Varda, for being indulgent.

Score: 
 Director: Agnès Varda  Running Time: 115 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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