Murmurs from the Heart: Agnès Varda in California

I fell hard for the late French filmmaker Agnès Varda when I saw her onscreen in her Oscar-nominated Faces Places (originally Visages Villages). In this late-in-life documentary, a big hit at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, the then-88-year-old Varda travels throughout the small towns of France with a decades-younger artist known as JR, snapping photos and posting giant murals of the citizenry. On screen, she’s a charming gamine: with her tiny frame, huge eyes, and mop of auburn hair, she looks like someone’s most amusing elderly aunt, still spry after all these years. (The tall, thin, bearded JR provides a wonderful counterpoint.)

 Varda was married for almost three decades to the equally creative Jacques Demy, best known for his all-musical 1964 hit, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Both gained fame as filmmakers during the rise of the French New Wave. (You can see them both represented in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s 2025 salute to the making of a seminal New Wave classic, Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1960.) It’s been a very long while since I watched Varda’s much-admired 1962 movie of the Paris streets, Cléo from 5 to 7, though I remember it being very much in the seemingly impromptu New Wave style. I was not a big fan of her equally-honored 1985 drama, Vagabond. But I suspect that Varda’s real talent lies in documentary filmmaking, in finding the pulse of a place, a time, and a people.

 Always a wanderer, Varda spent part of the 1960s in California, where she reunited with an elderly relative, captured the dynamism of the Black Panthers on film, and goggled at the L.A. mural scene. For her, as the film’s off-camera narrator, L.A.’s street murals are “living, breathing, seething walls.” She considers them “as beautiful as paintings,” revealing “everybody dreaming together,” even though some of them are crude, amateurish, and marred by graffiti.

 The 1981 film she made to celebrate L.A.’s murals is called Mur Murs . Clearly fond of word play and multilingual jokes, she has adapted the French word mur (for “wall”) into a variation on the English word “murmur.” (Around the same time, she also shot a modest dramatic film that used L.A.’s murals as an occasional backdrop. That 1982 piece, Documenteur, is wittily subtitled “an emotion picture.” I watched it too, but couldn’t find much interest in observing the low-key characters go about their business. It’s as a documentarian that Varda shines the brightest.)

 In Mur Murs she introduces the viewer to some of L.A.’s major mural artists , like Kent Twitchell. It’s poignant to see Twichell’s iconic L.A. Freeway Lady captured on film, since this monumental portrait of his grandmother and a world-spanning knitted afghan no longer gazes down on the Hollywood Freeway, having been painted over in 1987. I also enjoyed the glimpses provided by Varda of several of Santa Monica’s liveliest wall paintings. And it’s lovely to see the giant blue whales someone painted on a large wall in Venice dwarfing a solemn row of live tai chi practitioners.

 But though she has an eye for aesthetic appeal, Varda also seems fascinated by the cruder murals of East L.A. She views these as continuing the tradition of Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, who for a time lived and worked in SoCal. These dramatic works, often painted by collectives of amateur artists, are marked by deep emotion and a strong community spirit, because they tend to commemorate homeboys who have lost their lives to street violence.   

 Varda loves it all—the refined and the raw—and I love her celebration of these loud, bright murmurs. 

 

Once in a Blue Moon (Richard Linklater tries something completely new)

Filmmaker Richard Linklater was born and raised in Texas, so perhaps it makes sense to call him a maverick. A listing of his more than twenty films reveals how widely he has roamed, artistically, and how eager he is to try on new subjects and new styles. Early films like Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993) explore the aimlessness of Texas youth culture. Two years later Linklater was in Paris, shooting Before Sunrise, the first of three romantic meditations on love and time. (The others are 2004’s Before Sunset and 2013’s Before Midnight; all three films feature Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.) 

 While directing amiable studio comedies like School of Rock and Bad News Bears, Linklater was also writing and shooting the remarkable Boyhood. Filmed at intervals between 2002 and 2013, Boyhood is the close-to-the-bone story of a young Texas boy who grows from age 6 to 18, learning to cope with life in the face of his parents’ divorce. (Hawke plays young Mason’s father, and Patricia Arquette won an Oscar for portraying his mother.) Continuing his interest in the passage of time, Linklater is currently working on a cinematic version of Stephen Sondheim’s stage musical, Merrily We Roll Along. Sondheim’s play moves in reverse chronological order, with characters starting out as middle-aged cynics and moving backward to their college years, when they were young and idealistic. Linklater’s idea was to start by filming youthful performers in the play’s later scenes and keep at it intermittently until (approximately) 2040, when the actors would match the age of their characters’ older selves.

 All of this, of course, involves a lot of lag time, as Linklater waits for his lead actors—Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein—to be affected by the passage of time. Meanwhile, though, Linklater has found other ways to pump up his creative juices. Remarkably, he released two major films in 2025, both of them very much interested in exploring what it takes to be an artist.

 Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, was clearly made for a specialized audience, those cinéastes who are keen on the heady period known as the French New Wave. The film (shot in black & white, almost entirely en français) re-creates the dynamic period—circa 1960—when bright young French film critics like François Truffaut and Agnès Varda were making the move into becoming directors. The focus here is on the capricious Jean-Luc Godard, shooting on the streets of Paris an eccentric gangster thriller that seems to break every rule of standard filmmaking. It’s fun to peek behind the scenes of À bout de souffle (better known to most of us as Breathless), a film that every serious film buff knows practically by heart. I was most impressed with Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Zoe Deutsch impersonating Jean Seberg, a refugee from Hollywood not at all sure what she thinks about Godard’s guerrilla brand of filmmaking. 

 Last year Linklater also released Blue Moon, a biographical drama set almost entirely in New York’s famous Sardi’s. That’s where the great Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart has gone after ducking out on the triumphant opening night of Oklahoma!, written by his former partner Richard Rogers with newcomer Oscar Hammerstein II. A drunk and a self-hating homosexual, Hart tries to soothe his bruised ego with liquor, flirtation with a pretty co-ed, and delusions of future grandeur.  We know, though, that he’s very near the end of his road. Though Ethan Hawke hardly shares Hart’s looks and tiny frame, his is a masterful and fascinating performance as a man who talks (and talks) to silence the pain within. 

 

Taking a Stab at “Hit Man”

As a teacher of screenwriting through UCLA Extension’s The Writers’ Program, I’m always interested in what genres aspiring writers choose to concentrate on. I love the variety: romantic comedies, action adventure, heartfelt dramas, police procedurals, family fare. For a while, a good proportion of my advanced screenwriting students seemed to want to focus on the physical and moral perils of being a hit man. To each his (or her) own, I guess. But the key maxim for writers has always been Write What You Know. I suspect (phew!) that none of my students has put in time as a murderer for hire. That’s why these scripts, exciting though they may be, never seem to have the ring of reality.

 Which made me doubly curious about a new film, released through Netflix but currently in theatres, that’s been getting rave reviews. Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater from a script he co-wrote with the film’s star, Glen Powell, is based on a Texas Monthly article about a certain Gary Johnson. The  late Johnson was a mild-mannered college instructor, specializing in psychology and philosophy, who took on a part-time job posing as a hit man. His employer was the local police department: his goal was to ferret out citizens angry enough to pay a stranger to commit murder, after which they’d quickly be arrested and sent off to prison. Like his real-life counterpart, the film’s Gary Johnson discovers he thrives on donning disguises and dancing around the edges of actual mayhem. But, as the closing credits make clear, the actual Gary Johnson never broke the law. His screen counterpart, though, is a more complicated creature.

  It all starts when he meets Maddy (the gorgeous Adria Arjona) who wants to get rid of her abusive ex by any means necessary. She accepts the killer-for-hire she meets at face value:  he’s sexy tough-guy Ron. He knows, though, that underneath it all he’s meek and mild Gary, who’s quite capable of falling for Maddy, and doesn’t want to see her under arrest. When this irresistible force and this immovable object get together, sparks fly . . . and the audience thoroughly enjoys seeing where they go from here. No, of course I have no plans to give away the ending.

 I knew Richard Linklater’s work from back in the Nineties, when he introduced Matthew McConaughey to the world in Dazed and Confused.  In this century, he’s made successful studio films like School of Rock and Bad News Bears, while also experimenting with a romantic indie trilogy about two young people in Paris that started with Before Sunrise. To date, his bravest experiment has been with 2014’s Boyhood, an Oscar-nominated coming-of-age drama that was filmed between 2002 and 2013, allowing the main actors to grow and change over time. (Patricia Arquette won the statuette for Best Supporting Actress.) Now, however, he’s committed to filming Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, a musical theatre piece which covers a two-decade period in reverse chronology: he started filming in 2019 (with Ben Platt and Beany Feldstein in central roles) and—despite some key cast changes that have required major reshoots—plans to devote twenty years to the project. Good luck with that!

 Prior to Hit Man, I had never heard of Glen Powell. Now I know he has a long track record in TV, as well as recent successes in screen romantic comedies like Anyone But You. His breakout film role was as Lt. Jake "Hangman" Seresin in Top Gun: Maverick. Don’t blame me if all the flyboys in that film blur together in my mind.