Agnès Varda, the Belgian-French filmmaker who left us in 2019 at the ripe old age of 90, was a force to be reckoned with in European cinema. She was also one of the most truly adorable filmmakers around. Though she once hobnobbed with New Wave masters like Jean-Luc Godard (and was married to Jacques Demy until his 1990 passing), she was distinctively her own person. Small, petite, with a mop of hair and a wonderfully impish face, she wrote, directed, and edited films up until the year of her death.
No wonder the film world loved her. Such masters as Martin Scorsese, Ava Duvernay, and Guillermo del Toro sang her praises. In 2017 she became the oldest person ever selected for an honorary Oscar; in that same year her Faces Places was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Now the Academy Museum is dedicating a small but well-packed exhibit to her life and career. One wall (see below) features her unique self-portraits, in which she demonstrates her passion for art—and for distinctive faces—by making herself into a series of saints and sinners.
Varda, always artistically restless, explored both feature films and documentaries. One of her best regarded early works is Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961), in which a Parisian pop star restlessly passes two hours while waiting for the results of a biopsy. Just recently I was introduced to Vagabond (1985), in which Sandrine Bonnaire plays a young woman who has chosen to wander the wintry Languedoc countryside without education or goals. From the opening, we know of her sad fate. But much of the film’s focus is on her interactions with those who saw her last: a kindly Tunisian vineyard worker, a back-to-the-land philosopher who tries to persuade her to raise goats, a housekeeper who envies her “freedom,” some druggies who scheme to exploit her, a Good Samaritan female biologist who sees in her a fascinating curiosity.
Though the much-honored Vagabond is certainly downbeat, the same cannot be said of 2017’s Faces Places (its original French title is Visages Villages). Here the octogenarian Varda is seen on camera, making her own brand of art with co-conspirator JR, a tall, lanky photographer some fifty years her junior. The two share a whimsical journey through small-town France, taking with them a van (tricked out to look like a camera) that doubles as a travelling photo studio. Hobnobbing with residents, they make photo portraits, then blow them up into huge posters plastered on the walls of local buildings. One elderly woman in the north of France is the last inhabitant of a block of row houses once fully occupied by coal miners and their families. A miner’s daughter herself, she doesn’t want to move, because her surroundings are too full of memories. Imagine her surprise when she walks out her door and discovers, three stories high, her own face looking down at her.
The film is full of such celebrative moments, although the locals aren’t always sure they like their new public notoriety. In a nod to women, Varda and JR decorate a stack of dockside shipping containers with the bold images of three wives of shipyard workers. They have fun with one another too: he decorates the tank cars of a local train with photos of her wide eyes and “too-small” feet. And, after hours, he gaily pushes her through the Louvre in a wheelchair, moving at a wild clip so that the fabulous art on display skips by.
All this helps make up for the chilly, puzzling brush-off by Godard near the film’s end.
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