Les plages d’Agnès is a documentary about French new-wave filmmaker Agnès Varda. I haven’t seen any of her work, but conceptually as a filmmaker crafting her autobiography in film, this is an exquisite portrait that sometimes falls into the realm of hagiography. She sets herself up as an enigma, and the film’s structure reflects the fragmented positioning of the mirrors she puts onto the beaches at the beginning of the film. While the camera itself is rarely seen in these reflections, its position is always centered, making this an apt metaphor for how Varda sees herself. Fragmented through history, constantly receding from view, sometimes behind the camera but always there.
She speaks sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly about her memories, and this is the structure of the film – passing back into Varda’s experience, we see the genesis of the French New Wave (a blanket term for a group of French directors experimenting with narrative in the 50s and 60s, such as Godard, Truffaut, Charbol and, naturally, Varda – they created long, elaborate tracking shots, the film as real-time (24 owes a great debt to Varda!), the freeze frame (see the last shot of The 400 Blows for a shot that was truly shocking in its day that has become so familiar it’s difficult to see it was nothing but cheese) and so on). Unfortunately, much of Varda’s excess comes in the form of her attempting to position herself among these other filmmakers, and those of the Rive Gauche film movement to which she is retroactively closer placed (along the likes of Alain Resnais), who were a little more experimental. And while it’s true she’s oft-considered the grandmother of the French New Wave, she does little to give insight into the movement, rather than rattling off the various connections and bon mots she knows of these incredibly influential (herself among them, of course) filmmakers, and it creates a list-like feeling of name dropping that distracts from Varda herself.
Agnes inspects the mirrors inspecting Agnes to determine whether the sand has gotten any hair in it.
But others – she is nakedly emotional, and the closeness one feels to her in these moments is unlike any other documentary I’ve seen. Witness the scenes where she speaks of her final collaboration with her husband, Jacques Demy, who was dying of AIDS. Or the scene where she takes the children of the actors she used in La Pointe-Courte, and has them push a cart through the fishing town of the film, watching their parents in the film itself walking along the same area they now walk, at sunset. It’s scenes like this we feel we get to know the most about Varda, what makes the film so successful is not the “she lived, she filmed, she knew” format of your typical biography, but the insight we get into much of her creative process, and the way she constructs these scenes, interrelated and pointing at each other, shedding light on one another, and giving us a clear view of the ocean behind us, its waves coming closer to us for a moment, and then receding back out into the blue, only to come and come again.
