The Beaches of Agnes

In 2008, on the occasion of her 80th birthday, Agnes Varda made a documentary about her life, and stated it would likely be her last film. That didn't turn out to be true, thankfully, but this would have been a very fine send off. It is a collage of things in her life, woven in a chronological thread of her work and events in personal life, particularly her marriage to Jacques Demy, who you can tell she still really misses.

Varda doesn't do this in a boring manner. The opening sequence is men putting mirrors on the beach. As the title would suggest, beaches play an important part in her life. She grew up in Belgium and frequented the beach there. She lived in Sete (the location of her first film, La Pointe-Court), a fishing village, and even spent some time in Hollywood, and hung out at Venice Beach. The mirrors are an obvious symbol making a retrospective of their life.

Varda didn't make too many features, and many of them are unavailable (one of them, called Lion Love, stars Hair creators James Rado and Gerome Ragni, along with Andy Warhol starlet Viva, and they all appear to spend the entire film naked). She has made a lot of documentaries (her latest film is one, called Faces Places). We see scenes from almost all of them. She returns to La Pointe-Court to visit with some of the people there (she got a street named after her). She talks about being part of the French New Wave, her film Cleo from 5 to 7, and shows many of her photographs of other directors of the time (including a rare shot of Jean-Luc Godard without his sunglasses).

Later, we will see the process that went into her feature Vagabond, but much of the last half of the film is her relationship with Demy, who was a great director in his own right. He died of AIDS in 1991, and she doesn't shy away from talking about it. We meet her children, her grandchildren, and her doing some mundane things that in another's hands might seem frightfully self-indulgent. Varda gets away with it, because she seems like such a nice person, and damn it, she's a cute old lady.