French Film Festival UK
Agnès Varda’s ascension from just another member of the French New Wave, relegated to a second stringer beneath Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Éric Rohmer, to one of the pre-eminent, most beloved filmmakers in all of cinema has been on of the most pleasing developments of the last couple of decades.
To this end, the existence of this film alone is heartening. Varda now sits at a place where a documentary like this can get green-lit; broad, populist, removed from the academic and cinephile discussions she was once the reserve of. Here we get Varda by those that knew and loved her and her work; her family, fellow filmmakers and critics, and as such it’s by no means a deep dive, though enjoyable all the same.What the film does well is to articulate what was radical about Varda, marking out the way in which her personal radicalism fed into her artistic boundary-pushing and vice-versa, her disinterest in film as academic pursuit, her authentic love of the unrepresented. It establishes her as divergent from the male contemporaries she was historically lumped in with, the film-making paramount that she was in fact their precursor, always at arms length from the New Wave (her honest rejection of an invitation to write for the genre’s key journal, Cahiers du Cinema, is perhaps the film’s funniest moment).
It’s a key correcting of a history that often, at least in popular narratives, presents Godard as the central figure of innovation in that era. That said, this interest in her formal radicalism does not extend to the film itself, a sturdily constructed if ultimately televisual (the medium where it will likely be best suited) affair.This means there are great swathes of her career that are ripe for real investigation that only get a cursory nod; the less-told story of her time in China and Cuba for instance gets about forty-five seconds. It means that the film works far better as a primer for the uninitiated than as anything more thorough, a flying taster of the various facets of her films that will hopefully convince anyone who is yet to find her work that there is something in there for them.
To those that already know and love Agnès Varda’s work, it’s a well-told condensing of her life, and director Pierre-Henri Gibert channels the warmth of seeing a film-maker, for so long undervalued, consolidate their place in the canon; just don’t expect any grand revelations.The French Film Festival UK 2023 runs until the 14 December at various venues around the UK.
-Joe Creely-
