Les plages d’Agnès
Agnès Varda (2008)
The beaches of the title are in Belgium, where Agnès Varda was born and where this autobiographical documentary begins. In her opening words, she explains that, ‘They say that inside people there are landscapes. If you opened me up, you would find these beaches’. Varda made the film as she approached her eightieth birthday (a ‘surprise’ birthday party – inserted midway through the closing credits – provides a brief epilogue). She’s a nearly continuous voice on the soundtrack and figure on the screen. The Beaches of Agnès is full of deft visual invention, of witty compositions and colour combinations. They run all the way from the mirrors set up on the beach in the opening sequence to the collection of differently-coloured brooms – one for each of Varda’s eighty years[1] – which she receives as a birthday present in the postscript. The exultant cleverness of the design makes the additional layers of humour pretty redundant – I could have done without the nudges of jaunty music and, especially, the bits where Varda takes a few steps backward in the frame to illustrate her going back in time (even though her movement is touchingly uncertain). She speaks more than once about the tricks and confusions of memory and the narrative is certainly discursive – although the intricacy of the film’s composition dazzlingly refutes any idea that Varda’s artistic mind is anything less than incisively imaginative and clear.
Varda has had a long and enriching life: she’s an admired photographer and director; her paths have crossed with those of an extraordinary range of remarkable people, including the prime movers within the nouvelle vague and (as I learned here) Fidel Castro; she now has two children and four grandchildren whom she evidently adores and who love her back. Short and (in old age) plump, she’s a very engaging presence – like a humorous partridge – but she also exudes sadness and The Beaches of Agnès registers most strongly as a film about loss. Varda is tearful when she speaks to her photographs of a succession of famous actors (Jean Vilar, Maria Casares, Philippe Noiret, Gérard Philippe et al): all gone. She tells us that each of these deaths leads her back ineluctably to the death of her husband Jacques Demy (from AIDS in 1990). The loss of him is a leitmotif in the story she tells and an evidently raw wound.
5 October 2009
[1] This is from the French phrase ‘avoir xx balais’, meaning ‘to be xx years old’.
