Varda by Agnes (2019)

Directed by: Agnès Varda, Didier Rouget | 115 minutes | documentary | Starring: Agnès Varda, Sandrine Bonnaire, Hervé Chandès, Nurith Aviv, Esther Levesque

Remarkably, the retrospective ‘Varda par Agnès’ (2018) by the recently deceased Agnes Varda only starts to get really interesting after most of her career is behind us. And that’s saying something, because Varda’s working life spans a period of seventy years.

She started as a photographer in 1948 at the age of twenty and made the step to cinema in 1954 with her debut ‘La pointe courte’ (1955). A classic within what would later become known as the Nouvelle Vague movement. Until the early 1990s she made a number of well-received feature films and a large number of documentaries. Her last feature film ‘Les cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma’ from 1995, a nostalgic ode to cinema, packed with a host of big names, flopped.

Varda was now 67 and she did not expect to make such a prestigious and relatively expensive project. It marked the end of a period in her life. Five years later, however, she would reinvent herself as a visual artist using digital video technology.

We are then just over halfway through ‘Varda par Agnès’. She devotes the same amount of time to the treatment of the last twenty-three years of her life. Not that her earlier work is any less interesting, but the feature films are so diverse in content and stylistics that they pass by a bit lost in this overview. Varda lets the loose anecdotes follow each other in rapid succession, some with more and less attention. Sometimes she looks back fondly, especially when she recalls her husband Jacques Demy and Jane Birkin.

Around the turn of the millennium, Varda makes a new start with a documentary about food foragers and a beautiful installation based on shriveling potatoes. Many more works would follow, including the great “Visages Villages” with street artist JR, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

The stories are livelier and more lucid, as if Varda is only now having fun. In this last part of ‘Varda par Agnès’, Varda’s playful and astute genius comes to the fore and we, as viewers, finally feel really allowed into her way of thinking.