Agnès Varda takes an irresistible stroll through her life and movies
by Jim Ridley
Of Milt Hinton, the bassist turned photographer who took some of the most joyous, unguarded portraits ever made of various jazz greats, it was said that the reason his subjects always seem to be smiling is because they're looking at the man behind the camera. You could say the same of Agnès Varda, the octogenarian French New Wave precursor and comrade, after basking in the magic-hour warmth of her documentary The Beaches of Agnès—a movie that reclaims the adjective "life-affirming" from its years shackled to saccharine awards bait.
Less an autobiography than a kind of flaneur's stroll through her life and movies, as if a playful and invigorated curator were conducting an unhurried tour of her 80 years on earth, The Beaches of Agnès expands upon the idea Varda introduced in her 2000 essay film The Gleaners and I—that she feels kinship as an artist with the people who find value and purpose in stuff others throw away. Turning a beach into a hall of mirrors in her opening sequence—it's amazing what ricochet-perspective magic tricks you can wring from a few strategically placed looking glasses—she uses the waterways threaded through her life as a loose organizing principle, revisiting the fishing-village setting of her first feature, 1956's La Pointe Courte, and the beach she walked with her late husband, Nouvelle Vague director Jacques Demy.
That description sounds relatively uneventful, though, when The Beaches of Agnès is pretty much all adventure—an epic of digression, with Varda's memories and copious image archive as primary media. As a filmmaker and photographer in the 1960s and '70s, Varda hit the front lines with first-wave feminists, befriended the Black Panthers and got to photograph Fidel Castro in post-revolution Cuba. As an informal social historian, she can come off as a sweet and shameless namedropper—but who else was capable of getting Godard to doff his trademark shades (his eyes are Buster Keaton soulful) and snagging candid footage of Jim Morrison? A viewer is just thankful she was there.
Varda emerges as someone whose openness to use the scraps that come her way still feeds her life and work—most affectingly in her 1990 film Jacquot, made from snippets of her husband's boyhood and films as Demy was dying (of AIDS, she acknowledges here for perhaps the first time). She has film and photos to measure the passage of time, juxtaposing past and present—as in the luminous scene where two aging fishermen, young actors in Varda's first film, wheel a projector through the streets beaming their 50-years-younger selves on a makeshift screen.
With her bowl-cut hair and big mischievous eyes, the pixieish Varda frequently cuts a comic figure. "I'm playing the part of an old woman," she says in the movie's first line. But The Beaches of Agnès feels like the work of a very young old woman. It's a testament to the solace of good company and grandkids, to fond, frankly carnal memories, to a life lived as a mixtape of endless possibilities, and to images that can always be put to use another day, another way.
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