Two by Agnès Varda, cinematic poet. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM and STEVE GARDEN.

IT’S NOT HARD when you’ve got a beautiful person in Paris to make a beautiful film. But when that’s all you’ve got, it takes a special director to make something that’s not only resonant but a classic. But then Agnès Varda is one of those directors. She’s a director of moments, of the little pieces that people tend to forget, a gleaner who can become entranced with an accidental jiggling of a camera lens, a director who has been confronting mortality since this, her first feature. I am a little biased – her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse) is one of the most emotionally wonderful pieces of cinema ever made. And a film like Cléo from 5 to 7 shows just how important these themes of mortality, of wringing beauty out of the discarded, of being a hopeless dreamer in an otherwise cruel world, have been throughout her career.

The titular character (Corinne Marchand) is a trapped canary. She’s a blonde singer in a pretty cage, so the metaphor is reasonably obvious. Cléo is waiting for results from a test, and she fears that it might be cancer. She’s caught in that cruelty of beauty, where she thinks her relationships, success and lifestyle are solely thanks to her beauty. Her biggest fear is becoming ugly, disfigured, even old – as the beauty will have disappeared. She lacks proper human relationships, thinks retail therapy is a way to feel better about facing possible death, and pretends to be someone she’s not (her real name is Florence, and her intricate hair is a wig). The film progresses by Cléo breaking free from the confines of her own making, towards something that accepts the liberating simplicity of the world around her. The film is shot in real-time (take that 24), as the two hours that Cléo is forced to wait for her results unfold in front of us. Varda skilfully uses her soundtrack to maintain continuity – the overlap of sound (often ‘off-screen’) gives her the ability to experiment with the film’s visual style.

Agnès Varda was a member of the so-called Left Bank filmmakers (also featuring the likes of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais) who were prominent during the Nouvelle Vague. They were less fashionable than the more well-known Cahiers du Cinéma filmmakers (Godard, Truffaut etc.) but some of the Left Bank films are undoubted classics (La Jetée, Hiroshima, Mon Amour). The influence of figures like Godard however is obvious in Cléo from 5 to 7. Jump cuts, improvised camerawork, homages, gritty realism thrown alongside romanticism in full-flight, self-reflexivity, the use of the city as a character are all evident in the film. It’s not surprising that Varda gets Godard to cameo in the film-within-a-film (along with Godard’s then wife, Anna Karina) as a result. There’s also a cameo from Michel Legrand (famous for the soundtracks he provided for Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy, and who provided a soundtrack for this film). Cléo from 5 to 7, while full of Nouvelle Vague trickery, is never flippant or half-baked – and perhaps this explains why the Left Bank filmmakers perhaps feel less dated than their counterparts. Instead, Varda produces one of the more moving odes to life in the face of death, pulling out the most romantic notions out of the most banal.—Brannavan Gnanalingam


THE WORD ‘escapist’ is often used in connection with movies, but to really engage with cinema is to actively engage with the world. One filmmaker who vividly expresses this is Agnès Varda. All of her films – including the Nouvelle Vague classic, Cléo from 5 to 7; the politically charged Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi); the love letter to her partner, Jacquot de Nantes; the documentary on consumption and waste, The Gleaners and I – are responses to the times in which they were made. As such, they invite the viewer to enter a discussion about the sort of world we want on the one hand, and the aesthetics and responsibility of cinema on the other. The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d’Agnès) is no different, except that this time the subject is Varda herself – well, sort of. She uses her life as a pretext to playfully ruminate on all manner of things, and indeed her canvas is considerable.

Ostensibly autobiographic, Beaches is a highly aestheticised cine-collage (composed with relatively broad-brushstrokes) in which everything is essentially Varda-ised! She re-imagines her life as a colourful, at times surreal (almost fantastic) cinematic journey where memory and fiction are indistinguishable. In one scene, she dresses her family in identical soft pale fabric while she floats around them in deep earth tones. It’s a romantic, slightly portentous tableau, but it sits comfortably with the eclectic tone of the work. Varda has said that Beaches will be her last film, and one senses that this is how she would like to be remembered – and why not? It’s a gorgeous piece of work, and it expresses genuine, vital affection for people, art, and above all, cinema.—Steve Garden