Customer Reviews

The Beaches Of Agnes

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I saw this doc. at the Santa Barbara Int. Film Festival, for me, it was the best film in the fest -- and it is moving, touching, fascinating, beautiful and more. I hope it wins the Acad. Award. It most surely should, both for the innovative qualities of her story-telling and for the story, Ms. Varda's life. She says she's always been a gleaner -- and that was a wonderful film, The Gleaners and I -- and here she gleans her own life, makes a mosaic of all the bits and pieces, inspiring, I think, the rest of us to do similarly with our own. I look forward to buying the DVD - and I never buy DVDs, but this will be one to look at and look at and look at again.

I saw this in brooklyn and was instantly in awe. What an amazing woman but even more -this film is sheer delight and joy. The cinematography and framing are exquisite.It is almost divine! She has a mixture of new and old in the shots, the people and her wonderful voice and commentary. It is funny , poignant and inspiring.
Instantly in my all time top 5 films.
My only criticism...the last 7 -10 minutes are a bit dragged out and tedious.
Claire mcgrath

Granted, I am a huge fan of Agnès Varda's work--and persona. I've seen most of her American releases, which are, unfortunately, far fewer than the 46 films she's directed.

Eighty-one-year-old Varda is, first and foremost, a poet who happens to be holding a videocamera. And with this, her autobiography, she quickly brings us into the stream of consciousness of her brilliant mind, regaling us with both fantastic images, filmic experiments, and words rendered so quietly and sweetly that it belies their utter veracity. With the fluidity of a Russian ballerina, she weaves still photos, clips from her films, present-day documentary footage, and fictional re-creations.

A viewer with a familiarity of her oeuvre will obviously take away greater understanding and enjoyment of this recounting of her life and work. Yet, I believe it's accessible even for the uninitiated, as a tribute to an artist and iconoclast who sustains a strong vision and keen insight into life and art. And a great big heart.

" `If we opened up people, we'd find landscapes.' If we opened up me, we'd find beaches," she begins, an apt conceit for the half-Greek filmmaker who has lived her life near the sea. And thus, in the film's opening shots, she constructs a web of mirrors propped on easels in the sand, reflecting the incoming waves. These are fancy, gilded, furniture mirrors, large and small, capturing both la plage and Varda's reflection as she begins the narrative of her childhood. In and of itself, it's a beautiful installation piece--greatly enhanced by the reflexive quality of a sea of cameras filming themselves.

Moments later, she sets up family photos on blades of grass in the sand. While discussing an image of herself and her sister in their bathing suits, two little girls appear in current time, wearing the same sorts of suits. "I don't know what it means to re-create a scene like this. Do we relive the moment?" Varda wonders. But her answer seems less about reconstructing the past (this is not a wistful film like Bergman's Wild Strawberries), but more about delight in her powers as a magician with a camera. "For me, it's cinema, it's a game," she says.

Some of the film's sweetest moments derive from shots of her family--her two children and late-husband, fellow New Wave auteur Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). She obviously has great affection for the "peaceful island," as she describes them. In one lovely scene, the extended family is dressed in white gauze, frolicking. "Together they're the sum of my happiness. But I don't know if I know them, or understand them. I just go toward them."

Varda employs an unusual technique of re-creating the major moments of her life/films while bringing her current self into the proceedings. In the age of social networking a la Facebook, with gambits toward entering the past as we simultaneously dwell in the present, this seems a very contemporary notion. With the gift of memory, we both do and don't inhabit all of the times of our life at once. As she states, "I live. And as long as I live, I remember."

One of La Varda's most lovable traits is how utterly herself she can be. Her 8-decade-old hair sports its trademark bowl cut, yet in some scenes is colored almost parfaitlike (sans cerise) with white on top and deep red around the ends--gloriously unconventional, and wry. And indeed her sense of humor is continually present. She also has the good sense not to take herself completely seriously. After revisiting her early home in Brussels and discovering that it is now inhabited by an avid train enthusiast who prattles on about his collection, she concludes, "The `childhood home' part was a flop."

In 55 years of making films, the director has clearly spent ample time pondering the art of her craft. As she notes, "I think I've always lived in it." This is obviously so, and without traditional tutelage. She claims to have made her directorial debut, La Pointe-Courte (1955), after having taken in just 10 films in her first 25 years. This greatly flouted convention within French filmmaking of the time, in which training and credentials were paramount. Much of the film concerns images and the context of their creation-- the process of birthing, what prompts images into being, the results of their existence, the ripple effects of the filmmaker's art, and the inextricable link between maker and film.

Although Varda includes reenactments in this walk backward, she also allows the viewer to be in on their making. It's as if she hopes to underscore the artifice and revels in the fact that we will knowingly suspend our disbelief anyway. In one scene, she sets up a production office atop sand dumped on a city street.

The movie's final scene reveals Varda's "shack," a studio she's recently built on the beach. The filmmaker-as-architect metaphor made real, its walls are constructed of strips of celluloid from a 1966 film in carefully chosen colors, bathed in light. The structure is fragile yet appears solid. This is a wondrous metaphor, one that seems to encapsulate the artist's spirit and life. "In here, it feels like I live in cinema," she notes.

[..]

****1/2

"The Beaches of Agnes" is an autobiographical documentary done in a uniquely impressionistic style. The subject is Agnes Varda, the legendary French director who began her career in the 1950s and, who at the age of 80, shows that she is still a master of her art and craft. For not only does Varda provide the voiceover narration for the film, but she conceived and directed the project as well.

Varda uses as her focal point the various beaches where she spent a great deal of her time growing up. It is to these places that she has brought a crew of filmmakers to shoot her delivering extended monologues on her life and to restage - often in a cleverly amusing and surrealistic style - memories and events that have remained with her throughout the years. When she has actual photos and file footage from the past, she is quick to use them, but when she doesn't, she turns to present-day re-creations to fill in the gaps. But all is not limited to the beach, for she frequently heads inland to retrace the steps of her life, visiting key locations along the way.

She explores her childhood, when she lived much of the time on a houseboat; her teen years, when she was thoroughly ignorant of what a woman could do in the world and of the realities of man/woman relationships; her experiences during the War and the Occupation, when most French citizens "lived day to day;" her years studying art at the Ecole du Louvre; her first taste of freedom and independence when she stole off one night all on her own to Corsica; her time spent as a fisherman; her burgeoning fascination with photography; her marriage to fellow director and filmmaking inspiration, Jacques Demy; her role as mother and grandmother; her trips to Cuba and Southern California in the 1960s to capture in photos and on film the turbulent nature of that period; her fervent pro-feminist leanings that often found their way into her movies; and her eventual transition to filmmaking herself to become the only female figurehead of the French New Wave, an otherwise Young Boys' Club that included, in addition to Demy, Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, and various other cinematic masters.

It is here that the movie turns to Varda's career as a filmmaker, as the artist herself discusses her inspirations, her key themes and concerns, and the logistical problems of the moviemaking process itself. The movie provides us with a generous sampling of clips from not just her own movies but those of Demy as well.

As she reflects back on her life, Varda addresses the issues of aging, memory, and personal loss (especially of her beloved Jacques, who died of AIDS in 1990). She views the sea as representative of permanence - and human beings and their foreshortened life spans as symbols of the universe at its most temporal. Through its mixing of the real with the surreal, the literal with the figurative, "The Beaches of Agnes" mirrors the hybrid nature of Varda's photographic and cinematic works themselves.

But the movie is often at its most charming when it is content to simply BE, when some seemingly random image, person, event or thought comes along to capture Varda's complete and undivided attention - a testament to her astute powers of observation, to her complete and utter absorption in the moment, and to her ability to make art out of the raw materials of actual life.

And isn't that what moviemaking is really all about, after all?

Before I viewed a screening of THE BEACHES OF AGNES, a documentary on the life and times of film legend Agnes Varda (who was also wife of Jacques Demy), I knew very little of her.The only association I had of Agnes was that she was connected with the French New Wave, as a precursor. For those of you unfamiliar with the French New Wave, it was a term cloned to describe a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s who created a new and unique style of filmmaking, that openly rejected iconoclasm (destruction of symbolism, religious and otherwise) and was also an example of European art cinema. The films had long tracking shots, as well as a question or reflection of human existence. Varda was considered a "Left Bank Director" of this craft.

Varda, a Belgian born artiste of Greek and French extraction, was a rare breed in every sense of the word. That is made all the more evident in her depiction of life, through a series of episodic shots and dramatic exchanges on and off the beach. An avid beach comber, Varda (who was already in her declining years, while shooting this film) could think of no better landscape to discuss her life and life's work, than in a setting with sand and lapping waves (for me, in my stream of consciousness, I connected each wave filmed, as a reference to French New Wave genre that she was part of). The episodes draw on the absurd (case in point - a reenactment of a sexual encounter between her and filmmaker husband, Jacques Demy - she shows two actors lying on the beach, making love, while wearing bags over their heads). Scenes are spliced and diced, as well as infused with witty humor that plays on themes of the absurd. This isn't to say that Varda completely perverts her life, the circumstances in which she found herself in (she was already with child when she met Jacques Demy, and quite the artiste, in her own regard), but more that for her, the line gets blurred (or obliterated) between art and reality.

Agnes Varda always had a passion for photography that really took another turn, when she awoke to the fact that the moving picture was what really appealed to her and her sensibilities. Varda, the storyteller, began to emerge more and more as she took on the active role of griot, through her renderings of slice of life stories, brought to the screen. Her own life was so rich with metaphoric imagery - no doubt, her Greek roots tied her closely to a connection with water (fishing, etc) and more naturalistic settings. Varda's strengths were in telling compelling stories about the human experience, in a deeply sensitive and beautiful style. Case in point being La Pointe Courte, about an unhappy couple in a fishing village. Varda would marry Jacques Demy (another film legend) in 1962 and remained married to him, even as their relationship as man and wife drifted apart and then eased back together, in his declining years, when she nursed him up until his death from AIDS related complications. In fact, her love for him was so immense that she created a film about his decline. She shot close angled shots of every inch of his body - particularly his hair. This shot is compelling to me, because not only is it beautifully extended and detailed, but his beautiful, driftwood colored locks look like beach grass or the pampas of Argentina, and the texture is so strongly depicted, you can almost touch it with your eye. They show scenes of this, with voice over by Varda herself (who narrates this cinematic journey from start to finish).

Who would most be compelled or moved by this beautiful example of sensitive European documentary storytelling? Anyone who wants insight into this elusive and beautiful artist. Varda is like no artist or visionary I have ever come to learn about in my lifetime. This film nearly defies description, and I am amazed I was able to even attempt to depict it here. Please watch it and enlighten yourselves.

What a crazy surprise!

You must speck French or read subtitles (or wait until Harrison Ford shows up). If you can put up with French, then this might be worth your time.

The movie starts with a physical art installation (lots of mirrors, really kind of clever) on a beach by this little old grand mama.

I didn't know that she is a French genius: Hell, even if she is, she has got to prove it every time, every image, every movie right?

OK.
She may not be a French genius, but she sure as hell knows movies and images.

I kept waiting to turn her off. (She is an old funny-looking woman.) Her life with her family in Brussels. (Do I know Brussels? Do I care?) Still, she is so weird, I watch her instead of the tiny house and garden.

She runs away from home at 18 to fix nets and row the boat for a small crew of fisherman in the Mediterranean. I am waiting for the sex scene and it doesn't come.

She decides to be be a photographer.
Suddenly there are images that can't be ignored. Faces: my God, this woman know how to put a face in an image.

She continues to be weird, but it is so contrived, you know that she is isn't being weird, she is telling a JOKE! She is using her life like a comic, "Did you hear about the guy...?" to be funny, but it isn't just a joke.

Her hair is astounding. It is purple. It is black. It is red. It looks like a skunk tail!! It is hilarious! She knows damn well what she looks like! She walks backwards into her life again and again and I kept waiting for her to fall on her ass! ( I bet she did during filming and edited that out!)

Still, she is telling the JOKE! She shows us again and again that she can SEE. She shows us again and again that she thinks it is so funny to play with the images, especially of herself!

There are clips from her films: extraordinarily beautiful people doing odd things. She knows how to make a pretty picture if she wants.

She like to remind us that she associated with genius. Lots of photos to prove it. Oh well, Mary Magdalen talked up her association with Jesus and we still respect her, right?

She remembers her husband who died of AIDS. (It made me think: AIDS is hellaciously contagious yet she didn't catch it or die of it.)

Clearly, she loved him though. She portrays her husband and and herself with two actors making love, as if in a painting, with sacks over their heads. At first, the image is tastefully confined to sack-covered faces kissing.

After a minute or so of her narration, the camera pulls back and another JOKE! She remembers her husband as Arnold Schwarzenegger with a ten inch penis! (This is not an exaggeration. If you can't look at a human, close your eyes.)

Agnes' stand in has 36 inch plus boobs and curves to spare! By this time, she has already made clear what she and her husband looked like, so we know that this is wild fantasy, but it is astoundingly surprising and because of that funny!

Love this video - Quite amazing to document her life with
other actors. I love all her videos.