The Beaches of Agnes (2009)
The Beaches of Agnes (FR) Directed by Agnes Varda
Agnes Varda has spent her adult lifetime as an artist working with film/video as her medium. That she has made several full length narrative (Vagabond; Cleo from 5 to 7) and documentary (The Gleaners and I) features that are held in high esteem by most serious cinema critics seems almost besides the point when discussing her varied career, because for Varda, exploring her muse, experimenting with form, and continuing to evolve as an artist have all seemingly taken precedence over the desire to make movies for mass consumption and/or creating the kind of accesible art films that consistently garner insider accolades. At age eighty one, she remains an active force, producing photography, art installation, film shorts, and various types of visual pieces that speak, most notably, to issues of sexual politics. Varda’s auto-biographical documentary focuses on her long career and personal life, including her well-known marriage to fellow French director Jacques Demy. The title comes from the origins of Varda’s childhood, and the director cuts from a present day beach photo-shoot to photographs and film footage providing the visuals for her narration. Varda travels to her childhood home, the Belgian North Sea, the coastal town of Sete, and Venice, CA, using the beaches as markers to connect her life journey. Taking locations from her films beginning with her debut La Pointe Courte (1954), she visits the actual places, playing with the theme of life imitating art and vice versa. The film manages to dually translate as both a cogent story of a woman/artist’s life, and an impressionistic pastiche with multi-fold meanings illuminated through its illusive structure. Varda expresses a deep abiding sadness over the loss of the love of her life, Demy (from AIDS in 1990), though she chooses not to address his bisexuality, and how their complicated relationship was affected by his attraction to, and dalliances with, men. Her devotion to his memory imbues the film with a thread-line of emotion, but also leaves a void in a story that may have become something even more powerful with the inclusion of an examination of the particular dynamics of their longstanding coupling. Varda was part of the Rive Gauche or Left Bank filmmakers who preceded the French New Wave, and along with Christopher Marker (famously publicity shy, he interviews Varda here as a cartoon cat with a digitally altered voice) and Alain Resnais created a number of masterpieces with roots firmly planted in classic literature, and sharing a spare, poetic, dissonant aesthetic. Varda’s self portrait demonstrates the factual history of an artist who has remained relevant for over fifty years, but the true beauty lies in its construction, and in an artful rendering that, like the best of the form, transcends the limits of its scope.