39 movies and 200 pages of words from Amy Taubin, Michael Koresky, So Mayer, Alexandra Hidalgo, Ginette Vincendeau, and Rebecca Bengal, accompanied by scores of photographs and decorated with a palette befitting of its honoree, still feels inadequate for celebrating the life, art, and beatific spirit of Left Bank icon and art world legend, Agnès Varda. Varda, of course, lived a remarkable life and left behind a legacy to outsize her petite stature following her passing in 2019. The task of cataloging all of her comings and goings, and unpacking everything she meant to all of cinema and every cineaste, is a feat Hercules would’ve delegated to the next poor schmuck, so 39 movies, 200 pages of words, and scores of photographs is an unqualified gift. Even if it is spectacular.
A chunk of moviegoers with a fondness for the New Wave recognize Varda as their art-house grandma, known almost as much for her films as for the indelible figure she cut: Short, ever-smiling with her eyes of not her lips, crowned by a bowl cut dyed either brown or purple depending on the day, always fashionable, endlessly gracious. She was a character. With the Criterion Collection’s latest box set, “The Complete Films of Agnès Varda,” the “was” becomes “is”; while Varda immortalized herself through her own efforts as a documentarian, director, screenwriter, and photographer so and doesn’t require any additional immortalizing, Criterion’s enormous dedication to her name can’t immortalize her less. Given that Varda’s movies are underrepresented in the Collection, the set’s breadth feels appropriately grand and humbling at the same time.
Where one starts with “The Complete Films of Agnès Varda” depends on how complete one’s knowledge of her films happens to be. Odds are that most people cracking the set open have seen, say, “Vagabond,” and more still have almost undoubtedly seen “Faces Places,” met with love and adulation in 2017 at a moment when the world needed a bit of levity married with soul-searching, abiding compassion, and affirmation of art’s great worth for nourishing the heart. The essays, as Criterion essays tend to be, offer context and perspective into what Varda and her work meant—to cinema, to cinephiles, to art as a meaningful pursuit. In “Godmotherly Love,” Hidalgo relates an anecdote centering on a screening of “Faces Places” and one of her student’s response to it: “It’s exactly the kind of film I want to make”; in “A Woman’s Truth,” Vincendeau confronts labels and Varda’s polite distaste for the qualifier of “woman filmmaker,” even as her movies dug deep into women’s psychology and lived-in experiences.
This fits Varda’s legend. To her, film is a communal activity, something anyone can engage and with which everyone should engage; it’s a medium through which people can relate to one another across geographic divides or social bounds. Varda’s movies explore how she relates to people too, whether strangers, her neighbors, or fictions she writes on the page. Not incidentally, sitting with “The Complete Films of Agnès Varda” from start to finish reveals how her movies relate to each other, too, from “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t” and “Réponse de Femmes: Notre Corps, Notre Sexe” as portraits of feminine identity and sovereignty, to “Faces Places,” “The Gleaners and I,” and “The Beaches of Agnès,” each fixating on Varda to degrees as either a participant in her projects or the subject of her camera.
So in retrospect, “The Complete Films of Agnès Varda” should’ve just been called “The Complete Agnès Varda”: She was her films, and her films are her.
“Cléo from 5 to 7”
Varda’s filmography mostly sticks to society’s fringes, focusing on people who live far off the periphery of both regular and well-off folks. Anybody disenfranchised by a capitalist hierarchy, she’s interested in them. “Cléo from 5 to 7” is an exception: It’s the rare Varda movie that invests 2 hours into an upper-class existence, being that of Cléo, a pop singer in the thrall of mortal peril after a tarot reading spells certain doom for her in the shape of a cancer diagnosis. In the realm of better news, she’s at least destined to meet a chatty lad, which only qualifies as “better” because anything’s better than hearing that you have cancer. Social strata discrepancies aside, Varda demonstrates her quality as a humanist with her lens: Cléo has money and status, but she’s also subject to the gaze and whims of people in her orbit, which sucks given that they don’t exactly have her best interests at heart. Varda, however, does. Unlike her handlers, suitors, and hangers-on, “Cléo from 5 to 7” sees Cléo. She isn’t a child but a woman grappling with her existential fear; Varda’s serene craft and playful spirit blends dread with joy and lifts those fears heavenward.
“Faces, Places”
Standing next to one another, Varda and her collaborator JR make a comic pairing: Not that he’s the tallest man in the world, but he makes her look Lilliputian; he’s adorned in the outward trappings of contemporary style, never without his sunglasses and a brimmed hat, while she’s outfitted in the declaration of classic boho cool. This, of course, is the source of their alchemical bond as artists and human beings. The differences in appearance are proof of their similarities, and in “Faces Places,” they get to perform as kindred spirits as they tour small towns throughout France and connect with their residents, all the while plastering towering portraits of the men and women they meet on buildings and homes. Art brings us all together. “Faces Places” begins on that note by bringing JR and Varda together, and continues with its explorations of what brings a community together and, maybe most of all, the importance of hearing others’ stories.
“Vagabond”
Mona may be the most marginalized character in Varda’s body of work, or specifically, the most commonly marginalized character in the sense that we’ve all probably passed a hitchhiker on the road and totally ignored their existence. There’s a reason for leaving that person on the side of the highway: You don’t know who they are or what they want until they’re already in your car. But Mona wants her freedom, plus an occasional bath and an empty room to adopt as a temporary makeshift shelter. She wants to live a life separated from the dulling grind of civilization, so much so that she’s willing to bet on her survival just to spare herself from spending another day stuck in an office. “Vagabond” opens on the sad outcome of her gamble, sort of a neorealist version of “Sunset Boulevard” but decidedly grimmer. For nearly 2 hours, Varda paints Mona using her own palette as well as accounts of people who crossed paths with her; whether they’re favorable or not, they comprise a portion of Mona’s being because people don’t exist in vacuums. Each of us is self-defined, but “Vagabond” suggests that we’re defined by how others see us, too.