Varda by Agnès review: A parting gift from one of the greatest directors who ever lived

The late Belgian-born filmmaker allows memory to take the wheel, in this thoughtful, meandering journey through her work

Clarisse Loughrey
Thursday 18 July 2019 13:37 BST
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Agnes by Varda - trailer

Dir: Agnès Varda. Starring Agnès Varda. 15 cert, 114 mins

When Varda by Agnès premiered at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the Belgian-born director Agnès Varda declared it her final feature. At the age of 90, filmmaking had grown too taxing for her, she explained. Many of those present joked that she’d soon walk back on her words, considering how full of wit, joy, and curiosity about the world her documentary seemed to be. Now, following her death in March, Varda by Agnès arrives in UK cinemas as an entirely different work. What was once a leisurely walk through the director’s back catalogue, now feels bittersweet.

For much of her career, Varda was loved by those familiar with her work, but stubbornly underappreciated within the wider film canon. Despite her 1954 debut, La Pointe Courte, being widely considered the first film of the French New Wave, her work was never popularised to the extent of that created by the men of the movement, like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. She seemed always to exist right below the surface. But in an era where it’s become clearer than ever that female directors have been robbed of their rightful place in film history, Varda has finally begun to receive her due attention.

Her 2017 documentary Faces Places, made in collaboration with French artist JR, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, making Varda the oldest person to ever be nominated. That year, she also became the first female director to be awarded an honourary Oscar. Cardboard cutouts of her and her trademark two-tone bob (a stripe of grey hair and a stripe of red, making her look a little like a red panda) began popping up across the globe as part of the promotion for the film, turning her into something of an internet meme. Varda by Agnès feels like the culmination of all this, allowing the director to dictate exactly what her role in the film canon should look like. It’s also now a parting gift from one of the greatest directors who ever lived.

As a rough journey through her filmography, Varda by Agnès isn’t presented in any particular order or with the usual biographical details you’d expect. Varda allows memory – and its fleeting, meandering nature – to take the wheel, with the only real structure being the divide between her work before and after the invention of the digital camera (which she enthuses about, using the words “fantastic”, “narcissistic”, and “photorealistic”). The second half of the film deals also with her work in the visual arts, including the period where she’d show up to art shows dressed like a potato and the loving memorial she created for her deceased cat Zgougou at Paris’s Foundation Cartier.

Varda narrates the documentary herself, using material drawn from a talk she gave to young film students and cinephiles at a French opera house, alongside some complementary excerpts from other stops on her speaking tour and a bounty of clips from her own films. There is something simple and inviting in her approach, making it perfect for even total newcomers. She explains a few of the basics, including the use of objective and subjective time in her most famous work, Cléo from 5 to 7, and the 13 tracking shots in 1985’s Vagabond, which she talks about while sitting on a fake camera set-up, being pushed along a dolly track. She describes the three key stages of filmmaking: inspiration, creation, and sharing. The first two should be done relatively quickly, while the third is eternal. She also speaks in a touching way about her late husband, fellow director Jacques Demy, whose childhood she recreated in 1991’s Jacquot de Nantes, as he was dying from complications of Aids. She loved him and wanted to be close to him. In the film, her desires become literal, as the real Demy is framed in a series of extreme close-ups.

Yet, the biggest takeaway, and what Varda’s legacy should perhaps be defined by, is her investment in humanity. For a film that’s almost entirely narrated by her own voice, it doesn’t feel driven by ego, but by pure intellectual and emotional curiosity. “Nothing is trite if you film people with empathy and love,” she says at one point. It explains her life-long fascination with documentary filmmaking, even in her fictional work. In Cléo from 5 to 7, she captured the reactions of real Parisians watching her protagonist navigate through the city. In her 1976 documentary Daguerréotypes, she filmed those who lived and worked on her own street. Here, she labels the group the “silent majority”, describing those who keep to themselves and disconnect from the wider world. She then contrasts this to the idea of an “enraged minority”, the Black Panthers, the political organisation, who she examined in a 1968 film.

She’s elsewhere eager to shift credit on to her collaborators, from cinematographer Nurith Aviv to Vagabond star Sandrine Bonnaire.

There’s even a reminder that her previous attempt at a self-portrait, The Beaches of Agnès, became derailed when she visited her childhood home and met a couple obsessed with miniature trains, leading Varda, naturally, to turn the lens on them. “I’ve been right in choosing others over myself,” she concludes. Varda by Agnès is a reminder of how thankful we should be that she chose the path she did – and how much we owe to her as a filmmaker.

Varda by Agnès is released in UK cinemas on 19 July

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