French director basks in spotlight, one final time
Something curious happened to Agnès Varda with her last film, the freewheeling, personality-driven road doc “Faces Places”: At the age of 88, 60-odd years and 20-odd films into her career, she suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a meme. A wave of critics that had never previously demonstrated much interest in Varda’s work took to the new film at Cannes, the Academy suddenly lavished her with a nomination and an honorary Oscar after decades of looking the other way, and the director’s wry, twinkly presence and two-tone Miyazaki-witch bob (or failing that, a cutely promoted cardboard facsimile) became ubiquitous. Varda acquired a rare celebrity status for an auteur: Heading into her 10th decade, it seemed the woman was better known than her own work.
How exactly do you follow that up, given that “Faces Places” (with all respect to its folksy, minor-key charms) was never meant to be a watershed work?
Quite easily, it turns out: Maximizing the director’s distinctive personal brand from the title downward, the mellow, reflective “Varda by Agnès” effectively amounts to a cinematic victory lap — mostly taking the form of a filmed master class.
For longtime Varda fans, this is unlikely to be a revelatory experience, though they’ll still feast on the general puckishness of her persona.
This is not, of course, Varda’s first docu-memoir. Initially intended to be her retirement film — little did she, or we, know what was coming — 2008’s wistful “The Beaches of Agnès” took a more personal, eccentric ramble through her past, focusing as much on life as on work. “Varda by Agnès” shares enough common threads with that film, not least its culminating shoreline metaphor, to render it a companion piece rather than an idle rehash.
Still, it’s a simpler work, linear if not quite chronological, that talks through her output one professional chapter at a time. Even when it departs from direct recordings of her recent lecture tour, the result plays in stretches like a well-assembled supercut of DVD director commentaries.
Similarly straightforward is the driving artistic philosophy that Varda, impish as ever at 90, expounds here.
The film opens on Varda, seated in her signature branded director’s chair, holding court in a theater filled with besotted young film buffs and scholars: “There might be children of paradise up there,” she beams, looking up to the cheap seats. Filmmaking, she repeatedly explains, comes down to three processes: inspiration, creation and sharing.
It’s the last of those that dominates here: Varda’s greatest films are generously and colorfully excerpted throughout, to whet the appetites of those who have never encountered “Cléo’s” still-zingy realtime realism, or the deceptively poppy, paintbox-bright feminism of “Le Bonheur.” (Fair play to Varda for not gliding past her duds, either: One of the film’s most amusing archival passages centers on Robert De Niro and Catherine Deneuve filming 1994’s all-star misfire “One Hundred and One Nights.”)
In the film’s second hour, the emphasis shifts to Varda’s work as a visual and installation artist: harder to sell on screen than her bejeweled films, maybe, though likelier to contain fresh insights for the initiated.
Slight as a Varda film, but shot through with its maker’s characteristic pluck and whimsy, “Varda by Agnès” gives her newly recruited fans everything they’ve come to see.