Film review

  • Varda by Agnès

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Agnès Varda (2019)

    Agnès Varda died in late March this year, aged ninety, a few weeks after this film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.  Her passing underlines, but doesn’t radically alter, the significance of Varda by Agnès:  this autobiographical documentary is a very conscious farewell.  Varda had been suffering from cancer; whether or not she was aware that her death was imminent, she clearly knew she’d made her last film.

    The eye disease from which she suffered was clearly becoming an increasing challenge, as illustrated in Faces Places, Varda’s 2017 collaboration with the photograffeur JR.  Under the opening titles of Varda by Agnès, the patterns of colour on the screen move in and out of focus, suggesting blurred vision.  At the close of the film, she recalls a memorable episode in Faces Places.  On a seashore rock formation, at low tide, JR posts a hugely enlarged image of Guy Bourdin, Varda’s friend and photographic model of more than half a century previously.   By the following morning, the sea has entirely effaced the photograph.  Varda says that she and JR considered ending Faces Places by vanishing into a near-sandstorm blown up by the coastal wind.  In the event, they didn’t but she decides to sign off in Varda by Agnès ‘disappearing in a blur’.  Her exit line is ‘Je vous quitte’ and the haze that fills the screen appears to spirit her away.  Although the fact of Varda’s death strengthens the metaphysical flavour of this finale, her leave-taking is also, more practically, an expression of a visual artist’s failing eyesight.

    The basic form of her swansong is simple enough although, characteristically for Varda, not as simple as it initially looks to be.  She sits on a stage, facing a large audience, and starts to talk to them and to camera about her life and work.  She asks for the first film clip to be shown on the large screen beside her.  We seem to be in for a straightforward illustrated lecture but none of the many subsequent clips is introduced in this explicit way.  The audience in the venue (an opera house converted to a cinema for the occasion, according to Varda) isn’t always the same one.  Early on, it seems largely to comprise aspiring film-makers, whom Varda addresses more directly than she does an older, more dressed-up assembly later in the film.  In other words, Varda by Agnès appears to splice different public performances that she’s given.

    Her narrative is remarkably fluent, even when it moves out of the theatre setting entirely.  Varda returns, for example, to the rural location of Vagabond (1985) to explain the disorienting intention of the right-to-left tracking shots she used repeatedly in that film and to talk with its star, Sandrine Bonnaire, who recalls – with good humour but without pulling punches – the gruelling things that Varda made her do.  Footage of interviews conducted with Varda at or closer to the time she made a particular film is inserted at several points.  Back in the theatre, there are a couple of onstage conversations – with the cinematographer Nurith Aviv, who shot some mid-period Varda films; and Hervé Chandès, director of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, which has exhibited and acquired several of her installations and other artefacts.

    She looks and sometimes sounds tired but Varda is unfailingly lucid and cogent, whether she’s dealing with political history, film techniques or feelings about existence, mortality and people.  In sequences in the theatre, she occasionally looks down at notes but these are a prompt rather than a transcript.  She’s well prepared yet gives the impression of speaking off the cuff.  Even though she doesn’t work through her oeuvre in strict date sequence, she observes chronological order enough to convey the trajectory of her career.  The narrative finds time to cover her photography and, as implied by Hervé Chandès’ involvement, her work as an exhibition and installation artist.  I was pleased her documentaries got as much screen time as they do here.  While I’m not a fan of the few non-documentary Varda films I’ve seen, she’s so clear-minded and articulate that it’s well worth hearing what she was aiming to do in these too.  This applies even to a picture like One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) although it’s a relief that the excerpts illustrating the result are short.

    At the very start, Varda defines what have been her three priorities in cinema:  inspiration (why she makes a film), creation (how she makes it) and sharing (the necessary result of making it).  The shape and focus of what follows reflect these priorities, though never too emphatically.  Her most celebrated dramas, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Vagabond, incorporate documentary elements.  As she makes clear in Varda by Agnès, the same applies, vice versa, in her approach to documentary film-making.  (When I tried to key in ‘vice versa‘ in the notes I put on my phone after seeing the film, the predictive text insisted this should be ‘vice Varda’, which seems right enough.)  Addressing the audience of film students, Varda distinguishes two types of documentary – the ‘pure and brutal’ and the ‘filmic’.  The former type, she says, simply records reality.  The latter type, to which she’s firmly committed, presupposes a point of view that the film-making reflects – a kind of shaped, even staged reality.

    I’m usually left cold by the visual jokes of which Varda seems always to have been fond but these too are easy to tolerate in the context of this particular film – leavened as they sometimes are by a more substantial and self-deprecating humour.   She describes how she intended to film her childhood home in Belgium.  The house she grew up in now belonged to a couple of model railway fanatics – or ‘trainopaths’, as the husband calls himself and his wife.  They laugh about their obsession without in the least apologising for it.  In each of The Gleaners and I (2000), The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and Faces Places (the three documentaries by her that I’ve so far seen), Varda consistently features people whom she finds extraordinary and appealing.  It’s typical of her that her fascination with the trainopaths resulted, as she acknowledges, in their completely upstaging her return-to-childhood reflections.

    At 115 minutes, Varda by Agnès isn’t short (and doesn’t feel it) but fair enough:  it’s the story of an extraordinary and extraordinarily long career.  It’s full of things that hadn’t occurred to me, like how the advent of digital cameras has allowed those interviewed by documentary film-makers to feel a greater sense of privacy (though Varda doesn’t go on to admit that, once the result is ‘shared’, this turns out to be an illusion of privacy).  And there are good jokes, when they’re not too preconceived.  Varda stops herself a syllable into a parapraxis:  meaning to say ‘the chronology of my films’, she starts to say ‘the criminology’.  Quickly realising this is a Freudian slip not to be wasted, she decides to make clear what she nearly said by mistake.  Uttering all five syllables, she gets the full audience reaction benefit.  A more confounding joke – and it’s hard to think this wasn’t in Varda’s mind – is that by making this bracing autobiography and dying before it opened in cinemas, she has effectively thwarted any other film director with ideas about devising a posthumous tribute to her.  This is called what’s having the last word.

    15 August 2019

  • Holiday

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1938)

    Johnny Case, by dint of brains and hard work, has risen from humble origins to become a successful corporate lawyer on Wall Street.  A whirlwind romance with Julia Seton, the daughter of an enormously wealthy banking family, promises to make him even more financially comfortable.  There’s a hitch, though:  rather than making more money, Johnny wants to take time out – a holiday – to reflect on the meaning of life.  George Cukor’s comedy is based on a play by Philip Barry.  The original production of Holiday opened on Broadway in November 1928 and ran until June of the following year.  It was, in other words, written and first produced at a time when the American stock market was continuing to climb ever higher.

    The first film adaptation of Barry’s play, directed by Edward H Griffith, was released in 1930, after the Wall Street Crash but before the Great Depression had really begun to bite.  Holiday’s initial success in the theatre and on screen was enough to trigger the Columbia remake, with George Cukor at the helm and a cast headed by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.  In 1938, America was through the worst of the Depression but the economy was still very shaky.  The idea of a Wall Street banker affluent enough to stop working for as long as he needed was, by now, distinctly lacking in popular appeal.  The Cukor Holiday, although well received by critics, failed commercially.  There may have been a second important factor that kept audiences away:  this version arrived in cinemas in the same year that Katharine Hepburn was labelled ‘box-office poison’.

    It isn’t hard to see why Hepburn’s screen presence was turning people off.  As Linda Seton, the willful, volatile elder sister of conventional Julia, she’s technically impeccable.  She can change the emotional temperature of a scene apparently at will.  No actress has ever sped down a long, winding Hollywood staircase with her athletic elan (there’s more than one opportunity to do this in the Seton family’s vast Park Avenue mansion).  But Hepburn’s idiosyncratic tone and phrasing get to be grating when she has many lines to speak as she does here.  More crucially, she’s such a commanding performer that she always seems in charge.  When she realises she’s falling love with her prospective brother-in-law, the fast-talking, competitively witty Linda is suddenly vulnerable.  Katharine Hepburn carries this off so powerfully that the display of vulnerability comes across as a form of self-assertion.

    Cukor, Hepburn, Grant and Donald Ogden Stewart, who wrote the screenplay with Sidney Buchman, would team up successfully two years later on The Philadelphia Story – Philip Barry’s best-known play and, unless Stewart and Buchman’s adaptation did Barry a serious disservice, a much more satisfying piece than Holiday.  The personnel of The Philadelphia Story includes, as well as the super-rich characters, the journalist and photographer assigned to cover the high society wedding.  Professor Nick Potter (Edward Everett Horton) and his wife Susan (Jean Dixon), Johnny’s droll, benevolent friends, are a kind of leavening agent in Holiday but have much less screen time than their counterparts in the later work.  While extraordinary privilege dominates in Holiday, it’s also an Aunt Sally.  From the outset, the Setons’ absurd wealth is lampooned.  Linda, the only one of his three children who takes on the paterfamilias Edward (Henry Kolker), repeatedly comes out on top in their verbal exchanges.  The extent to which plutocracy has damaged Edward’s son – the alcoholic, ineffectual Ned (Lew Ayres), who could have been a composer but was pushed into banking – gives the material a bitter note that isn’t dispelled by the eventual triumph of love (between Linda and Johnny) over money.

    Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story has, in effect, three men to choose from:  her plodding nouveau riche fiancé George Kittredge; politically serious but romantically naïve Mac Connor; and C K Dexter Haven, the infuriating, charismatic playboy whom Tracy’s already divorced.  The romantic options for Johnny Case in Holiday aren’t just more limited and less entertaining.  His engagement to Julia doesn’t make sense – even comic sense, as a preposterous mismatch (as Tracy’s engagement to George is).  At the start of the film, he tells the Potters he knows nothing about her circumstances.  When he first visits the Setons’ home, he goes to the tradesman’s entrance rather than the front door.  Johnny’s marathon journey from the servants’ quarters to the room where he eventually meets Julia is amusing but he doesn’t react much to the discovery that the girl he means to marry is a member of one of New York’s wealthiest families – which isn’t sufficiently explained by his suspicion that there may be more to life than material wealth.  You never believe that Johnny could be infatuated with Doris Nolan’s Julia – or in the supposedly strong sisterly bond between her and Linda that subsequent events somehow destroy.  The script deliberately keeps Julia’s mercenary true colours under wraps until it’s good and ready for them to emerge.

    Katharine Hepburn’s performance – accomplished but not enjoyable – epitomises Holiday, though there are compensations.  Dismaying as Ned Seton is, Lew Ayres plays him gracefully.  Whereas the plot diminishes Julia too abruptly, Doris Nolan’s face, with the help of Franz Planer’s camera angles and lighting, hardens more gradually and persuasively.  It works for the character of self-made Johnny Case that Cary Grant, at this stage of his Hollywood career, still had a few rough edges.  Early on, Johnny does a cartwheel, then a somersault, explaining that, whenever he feels things are getting on top of him, this is how he cheers himself up.  Except for a few seconds’ acrobatics with Linda, Johnny – or, at least, George Cukor – then appears to forget about this remedy until the happy final scene of the film.  It’s a pity because Cary Grant’s gymnastic outbursts, along with Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon’s lovely double act, are the only things in Holiday that give real pleasure.

    12 August 2019

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