5 Review of La Pointe Courte Cahiers 53
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Living for Movie house, and Through It
IS at that place something about French republic — the nutrition, perhaps, or the wellness-care system — that accounts for the boggling creative longevity of so many of its filmmakers? A half-century after the New Wave crested and crashed ashore, a remarkable number of directors associated with that movement are yet making movies. Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol are approaching 80, and while Mr. Godard appears to accept slowed his pace a bit, Mr. Chabrol continues to produce sinister, elegant studies of passion and ability at the rate of well-nigh one a year. Jacques Rivette, 81, and Eric Rohmer, who turned 89 this year, recently take fabricated ambitious and well-regarded films, and Alain Resnais, now 87, was seen in Cannes last calendar month flouting the cherry-red-carpet dress code, collecting a lifetime-accomplishment award and presenting his latest movie.
And and then there is Agnès Varda, the only female filmmaker associated with the Nouvelle Vague at its loftier-water mark and at present, at 81, an artist of undiminished vigor, curiosity and intelligence. That is certainly how she appears in "The Beaches of Agnès," her latest film, which opens in New York on Midweek, afterwards winning a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for all-time documentary feature in February. Conceived every bit Ms. Varda'southward 80th altogether approached, "Beaches" is a cinematic memoir in two senses: an autobiography rendered in carefully chosen, meaning-rich images and the account of a life lived in, through and for cinema.
In that location is an elegiac undercurrent to the picture show — visits to familiar places that have changed over the years, recollections of the dead — but it is not so much concerned with taking stock or summing up as information technology is with the restless exploration of memory. "I wanted to be similar a bird," Ms. Varda said in an interview i wintry morning in Manhattan a few months agone. "I wanted to be free in my retentiveness, to get from one part to another and encounter what I would find." An inveterate collector of odd images and curious ideas — her 2003 documentary, "The Gleaners and I," is a personal and philosophical inquiry into the practice of gathering what has been discarded or passed over — Ms. Varda composed "Beaches" every bit a sort of living, moving collage.
The film includes an abundance of clips from her other films, and photographs capturing various journeys, projects and relationships, but it is less an archival exhibition than a wonder cabinet, full of whimsical inventions besides as recovered artifacts. The filmmaker Chris Marker, Ms. Varda'south "interlocutor," appears in the guise of an orange cartoon cat with a digitally altered voice. There are dreamy montages, re-enactments and surrealist gear up pieces that demonstrate her continued interest in installation fine art and photography every bit well as moving-picture show. The theme of the movie is beaches, and since Paris, where Ms. Varda has spent much of her working life, has none, she filled a street with sand and took the staff of her production company outside to sit at their desks in bathing suits.
Epitome
The picture show sustains an unusual blend of gravity and playfulness, a mood at one time ripe with experience and childlike in its chapters for wonder. "At ane screening," Ms. Varda said, "there was a young man, perhaps 22-years-old, who said well-nigh this film: 'Information technology gives you the desire to grow former.' "
Ms. Varda has something of a complicated history with the question of age. When she was barely 30, a photograph caption in a French mag labeled her "an ancestor of the New Moving ridge." The championship was bestowed in recognition of her kickoff (and, at the time, her only) characteristic film, "La Pointe Courte," whose pocket-sized means and restless artful and intellectual ambitions anticipated the breakout films of François Truffaut, Mr. Godard and the residuum by a skillful half-decade. "I thought, well, now that I am an antecedent, I don't have to grow any older," Ms. Varda has said, and the elfin, energetic figure she presents in her recent documentaries and in person is incomparably youthful, much as the unlined face up that stares from the pages of the former Nouvelle Vague yearbook seems preternaturally wise.
As the sole adult female in that charmed circumvolve of young lions, Ms. Varda has taken on more than her share of symbolic roles: mother, sister, confidante, colleague and — literally in the case of Jacques Demy, a young man managing director and her husband from 1962 until his expiry in 1990 — wife. Appearing on screen, in "Beaches" and "The Gleaners and I," surrounded by much younger crew members and performers, she is an near ideally grandmotherly presence, pre-empting the indignities of age with a self-mockery that subtracts zilch from her rigorous and skeptical intelligence.
A grandmother who, in telling stories almost the old days, is more apt to charm — or even shock — the kids than to bore them. "Many young people love me," she said, smiling at the forthrightness of the announcement. "Some of them call me Mamie Punk" — Granny Punk — "possibly considering of the hair." At the fourth dimension her coiffure was a violet fringe surmounted by a tonsure of grey, a Rothkoesque variation on the Dutch Boy she wears, impervious to changes in fashion, in every era covered by "The Beaches of Agnès."
Only the nickname too acknowledges a key attribute of Ms. Varda's personal and artistic fashion. Not quite the aggressive, nihilistic stance associated with punk rock, perhaps, but rather a kind of thrifty, skeptical anarchism of the spirit, a liberating willingness to find inspiration and even dazzler in what might conventionally be dismissed equally rough, ugly or commonplace.
"La Pointe Courte," that corking ancestral text, exemplifies this attitude, and affirms Ms. Varda'southward position at the vanguard non just of the New Wave, simply also of whatsoever filmmaking tendency worthy of the name independent. French cinema in 1954 was male dominated, hierarchical and rigidly bureaucratic, governed past an elaborate gear up of rules and protocols. An aspiring director was expected to jump through carefully placed and managed hoops of preparation, apprenticeship and credentialization. The thought that anyone could option upwards a camera, gather a crew and only commencement shooting a pic — it just was not done.
But that is just what Ms. Varda did. Trained as a photographer, she was, equally she puts it now, about entirely "innocent of cinema." Different her presently-to-be confreres in the New Wave, who emerged from the hothouses of the Paris Cinémathèque and Cahiers du Cinéma, she was neither a critic nor even much of a flick buff, having seen simply a handful of movies when she decided to make her ain. "I thought that pictures plus words, that was picture palace," she says at 1 point in an interview included on the Benchmark DVD of "La Pointe Courte." "It was only later that I discovered it was something else."
"La Pointe Courte," however, is anything merely a naïve, literal-minded lensman'southward foray into moviemaking. Its structure was suggested past "The Wild Palms," William Faulkner'southward novel composed of parallel stories told in alternating capacity. One thread of Ms. Varda'south flick follows a married couple, played by Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret (in his first movie function), every bit they discuss the ambiguous country of their love. Should they separate or not, and if and then why? They pose these questions — and pose in striking, quasi-Cubist close-ups and de Chiricoesque wide compositions — in the alleys and streets of Sète, the Mediterranean port town whose working-class residents supply the other half of the narrative. These fishermen and their families, more or less playing themselves, grapple with decease, work, marriage and the intrusions of health inspectors and other annoying agents of the state.
The dissimilarity betwixt the two halves of "La Pointe Courte" is feature of the tensions and complexities that flicker through nearly all of Ms. Varda'southward feature films. Documentary flows into artifice, abstraction gives way to naturalism, and movie theatre is revealed to consist of the collision, be it serendipitous or unsettling, between the institute and the fabricated. The two "plots" converge at a jousting tournament in which local men perched on platforms atop elaborately busy galleylike boats endeavour to knock each other into the water with long poles. The jousting sequence collapses the distinction between documentary and performance in what might be described as a characteristically Vardaesque fashion. If this curious and aboriginal ritual did non exist, she might have invented information technology.
Ane of the dividends of "The Beaches of Agnès" is that Ms. Varda allows herself, and the audience, to peek behind the scenes, to learn something about her techniques and the sources of her inspiration. Some of these have been personal and geographical: Sète, and so vivid in "La Pointe Courte," was where her family took refuge during Earth War 2 afterwards fleeing Belgium. Others are literary, artistic and political: the Surrealists, Picasso, the revolutions in Mainland china and Cuba and, above all, the ascent of feminism in the Due west.
She pauses to point out some of the motifs and formal choices in her work: the clocks that mark the minutes in "Cléo From v to 7," her 1962 real-time bout de forcefulness that follows a ravishing, broken-hearted blonde through the silvery streets of Paris; the right-to-left tracking shots that link the vignettes in "Vagabond"; the re-enactments of scenes from Demy'south films in "Jacquot de Nantes" (1991), her loving portrait of her husband as a young man.
These movies derange piece of cake description. (4 of the best and best known — "La Pointe Courte," "Cléo," "La Bonheur" and "Vagabond" — are available in an indispensable Criterion boxed set up.) And Ms. Varda counts just "Vagabond," in which Sandrine Bonnaire is heartbreaking and annoying equally a young adult female adrift, as an unqualified success. It won the Gilt Lion in Venice in 1985, a prize that, in "Beaches," is placed in the sand of her bootleg Parisian lido aslope Demy'due south Palme d'Or for "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964). Non that she is disappointed. "I am the queen of the margins," she said. "But the films are loved. The films are remembered. And this is my aim — to be loved equally a filmmaker because I want to share emotions, to share the pleasure of being a filmmaker."
Information technology is a pleasure she shared for nearly xxx years with Demy, who haunts "The Beaches of Agnès" like a benevolent, enigmatic ghost. "The honey of the dead," she calls him, and the great love of her life. Their artistic sensibilities were not closely aligned — his stated appetite was to make "calm films, films near happiness" while her work beard with a sense of contradiction — and the intimate details of their lives together, and of his affliction and decease at 59, are addressed with brevity and caution. The tone of the film is personal, but not confessional. It is more of an essay in memory than a memoir.
And, as such, it is about the fashion memory intrudes into and colors the present-tense flow of experience, much as Ms. Varda's cinema flows into the stream of everyday life. "Do I dream, or do I meet a motion picture of Jacques Demy?" she asked at one point in our interview, which took place at the offices of Film Forum, in a room full of picture stills and framed photographs of directors and stars. The i that caught her attention was at middle level, on the other side of the room. Had it been placed in that location on purpose, we wondered, like the tokens and talismans that find their way onto her beaches and into the frames of her films? It was, to apply 1 of her favorite words, a puzzle. Solving it diffused some of the mystery — the flick, on closer inspection, was not of Demy after all — but did not dispel the curiosity that drives Ms. Varda to suspension over details, impressions and moments. "I wonder who it is?" she said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/movies/28scot.html