The Beaches of Agnès

“Les Plages d’Agnès”, Agnès Varda, 2008, France, Colour, 110 mins, Certificate: 18

This is a life. Of a human being but also of cinema itself. We celebrate both this month, since on May 30th (the day of our screening!) would have been Agnès Varda’s 91 birthday, if she hadn’t died  last March 29th, quite suddenly in our eyes, as she was still very much alive and “kicking”, ever young at heart, only a few months ago, both at the Oscars and the BFI.

This is a documentary unlike any other you’ve seen before. As this trailblazer photographer, artist and filmmaker recounts her life and work with her unique, unexpectedly entertaining way, you will feel goosebumps of nostalgia, of laughter and tears sprouting. As if someone took a thorough peek at your own diary, translated it into moving images and put it out there for the world to see and share the/your experience.

Such was the extraordinary talent of Agnès. Making the personal universal while erasing the boundaries between film genres, high and popular culture, fringe and mainstream, national and international, life and art.

Born in Belgium to a Greek father and a French mother, she made Paris her home, Jacques Demy (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”) her partner in everything and film her mode of living. At 27 she made her feature debut with the unorthodox, part murder mystery, part love story, “La Pointe Courte”. At 30 she was dubbed “The Ancestor of the New Wave” – the influential cinema movement that changed the history of the medium and she (the only woman) along with (the all men club of) Demy, Alain Resnais, André Bazin, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette brought to the world in the late 50s.

At 33 she made her much lauded, landmark film “Cleo from 5 to 7”. At 80 she came up with these “Beaches” as an unlikely, playful, auto-biographical documentary/retrospective. At 89 she opened an Instagram account, scored her first ever Oscar nomination for the wonderful documentary she co-directed with photographer and muralist, J.R., “Faces, Places” (2017), and was finally awarded a long overdue Honorary Oscar for her overall contribution to the arts of motion pictures. Well, the world always struggled to keep up with her.

But don’t take my word for it. Come and enjoy her in all her ingenious glory.

Reviews:

“Varda… presides over… her lithe and leaping documentary scrapbook, like a Rachel Dratch who’s aged into a very wise old angel. Taking a trip back through the cinema, her own diary, and the 20th century, she lets you know that she’s conjuring her memories right on the spot, doing just what she wants to do. It’s that of-the-moment, life-unfolding-into-cinema spirit that defined the New Wave, and for this filmmaker it is now a way of being. In The Beaches of Agnès, you get addicted to watching Agnès Varda watch the world.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

“In her latest, the… glorious and generous “The Beaches of Agnès,… [the] images are as delightful, unexpected and playfully uninhibited as Ms. Varda, perhaps the only filmmaker who has both won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and strolled around an art exhibition while costumed as a potato (not at the same time)… At one point, she says she thinks of all men who look at the sea as Ulysses (she’s an aquatic soul), but she’s every bit the wanderer. Whether she’s roving a beach with a camera or rummaging through flea markets, she seeks and finds, gleaning — the word means to collect and examine — what this world of wonders has in store.” Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“Agnès Varda manages to be full of herself without seeming … full of herself. Perhaps that’s because her self is full of so much other stuff: friends, photos, films, buildings, and beaches… One job of memoir is to show the world through another’s eyes and inspire you to live more alertly, and that is the glory of The Beaches of Agnès. Her art is her omnivorousness. Near the end, she presents her children and their children: “I don’t know if I understand them,” she admits. “I just go toward them.” With love, she might have added, and a lens, as if to say, “Light, light against the dying of the light.” David Edelstein, New York Magazine