For me, Agnès Varda was the greatest of that great and long-lived generation of the French New Wave. She was a master of personal cinema and essay cinema, drama, satire, documentary and romance, and her work had a distinctive richness and wisdom. Her debut feature, La Pointe Courte (1954), is a study in contemporary relationships with a poetic poise that surpasses Hiroshima Mon Amour (whose director, Alain Resnais, worked on Pointe Courte as editor). Her early masterpiece Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) is news that stays news: a thrillingly urgent, intensely sexy and melancholy despatch from the epicentre of the 60s Parisian zeitgeist, which is far more interesting and conceptually supple than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.
Jacquot de Nantes (1991) is a stunningly moving and complex homage to her husband, Jacques Demy, mixing dramatised reconstructions of his memories with clips of his movies and heartwrenchingly intimate documentary footage of him at the end of his life. There are clear elements of François Truffaut, Louis Malle and Godard in this remarkable film, but it is ultimately in a class of its own, fusing cinephilia and emotional gentleness in a moving and original act of love.
Varda’s control of the interrelationship between drama and documentary realism was apparent from her very first film, the brilliantly shot La Pointe Courte, in which Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret play a couple returning to his hometown, a Mediterranean fishing village, after four years together in Paris. Their complex, fraught dialogue scenes – with something of Bergman as well as Resnais – are an anti-courtship; an anatomy of a failing relationship, as well an attempt to revive it. They are interspersed with gripping scenes of real life in the actual village, captured with poetic flair.
Cleo from 5 to 7 is still electrifyingly good after all these years: a dazzlingly audacious vérité adventure in the streets of Paris, using real shots of real people as they stare amused or astonished into Varda’s camera. In real time, from 5pm to 7pm (traditionally when Frenchmen met their mistresses, between the end of the working day and the time when a man might be expected back at the family home) we follow the beautiful singer and glamorous woman-about-town Cléo (Corinne Marchand). But this is also the time in which she must wait for the results of a cancer test. She is surrounded by amusing, talented and besotted men, including her piano accompanist, played by Michel Legrand, but there is no one she can really rely on: all she has is her beauty and loneliness. Varda’s script for this movie is brilliant – easily as good as Jacques Prevert – and the incidental lines are wonderful. So many people have been inspired by this movie, including Roman Polanski for Repulsion (1965) and Martin Scorsese for Taxi Driver (1976).
watch the trailer for Cleo from 5 to 7.
Le Bonheur (1965), or Happiness, deserves to be almost as well-known. It is an eerily calm, sunlit satire of modern society’s expectations of monogamy and romantic love. The real-life husband-and-wife actors Jean-Claude and Claire Drouot play married couple François and Thérèse, who are blissfully content until François falls in love with someone else. Instead of behaving as we might expect him to – with agonised self-doubt, say, or secretive roué defiance, or tragic determination to minimise the pain to his wife – François tells his wife the truth and simply expects them both to be as happy as they once were. Even more so, in fact. Things do not turn out that way. Could Happiness be a film that challenges the piety of relationships, or might it speak to a new 21st-century generation for whom the idea of polyamory is not alien?
Varda’s Vagabond (1985) is her mature masterpiece, a rebuke to the callous misogyny of French society. It is a story told indirectly, like Citizen Kane, but with incomparable artistry and decisiveness. Sandrine Bonnaire plays Mona, a young transient woman who drifts through the countryside, sleeping in fields and on roadsides. Her dead body is discovered by a farm worker and then the film pieces together her life in retrospect, with quasi-documentary interviews with various people she met. It is an almost religious film, in its way, a parable for the martyred loneliness of the marginalised and the dispossessed.
Varda exalted and immortalised her relationship with Demy in Jacquot de Nantes, a film with obvious resemblances to Les Quatre Cents Coups and Au Revoir les Enfants. As well as everything else, it is a kind of critical commentary on his kind of autobiographical rhetoric in French cinema – but so utterly distinctive. It is an arresting depiction of the young Jacques growing up in Nantes, having been evacuated to the country during the war, becoming fascinated by cinema and finally building the sets and cardboard figures for his remarkable stop-motion animations – and all interleaved with shrewdly chosen clips of his work and devastatingly moving studies of Demy as an old man at the end of his life. There isn’t a single film to compare with this. It is the work of an artist in a state of grace: gentle, insightful, wise.
The Gleaners and I (2000) and The Beaches of Agnès (2008) are two late gems, examples of “cinécriture”, works of introspection and philosophy infused with wit. In one, Varda meditates on western waste and the tradition of “gleaning” – the rural poor picking up leftover crops after the harvest – linking it to the freeganism food movement: people dumpster-diving in the bins behind supermarkets and finding a great deal of perfectly edible, vacuum-packed food. Varda herself is a gleaner, or, in the Shakespearian phrase, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles: she sees how details and people who might be overlooked or neglected are of enormous value. The Beaches of Agnès is a kind of autobiographical or personal film, which links back to Jacquot de Nantes as an essay-cum-collage of ideas and recreated experiences. In it, she finds herself on the beach, a place outside time, where the ageing Demy was to be seen in her earlier film.
The Beaches of Agnes
To the very end, Varda had incomparable vitality and creativity – and accessibility. Her 2017 documentary Faces Places, about her work with the photographer and installation artist JR, entranced everyone and earned her an Oscar nomination. Her work was not commercial in any generally accepted sense, but her ideas were crucially lucid and available. Audiences young and old loved her.
In The Beaches of Agnès she said: “Imagining oneself as a child is like walking backwards. Imagining oneself ancient is funny, like a dirty joke.” It is difficult to imagine Varda old. She artlessly kept the same gamine hairstyle all her life. She was a young soul, and a great one.
