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| Writer/director Agnès Varda |
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| Varda with Sabine Mamou |
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| Varda on the beach with her son Mathieu |
DOCUMENTEUR A France USA (65 mi) 1981 d: Agnès Varda
The tone of this small-scale film is introspective, arguably the most personal and poetic film Varda ever made, while it’s also reportedly her favorite, one of few filmmakers who can get to the depths of melancholy and aloneness, listed in the opening credits as “An Emotion Picture.” Set in Los Angeles when Varda was alone with her young son, having temporarily separated from her bisexual husband Jacques Demy, who was involved with a young story editor named David Bombyk, where the film captures the pervasive sense of loneliness and alienation. Varda and Demy spent several years in Los Angles at the end of the 1960’s, where she became fascinated with the proliferation of murals around the city, so a subsequent move to Venice Beach from 1979 to 1981 revitalized that interest. Written in the shadow of Mur Murs (1981), a kaleidoscopic documentary on painting that explores the striking, largely Chicano murals that decorate the city of Los Angeles with immense graphic designs filling empty concrete spaces, often staged for dramatic effect, this was intended to be seen as a companion piece, conceived as twin films, released in theaters as a double bill, where the two are inextricably linked, with overlapping images and ideas, as this picks up from the final shot of the earlier film and incorporates elements from it. Different in appearance and tone, more downbeat than the sunny predecessor, this film is a work of pure fiction that blurs the lines, bridging the gap between documentary and fiction, incorporating Varda’s expertise as a photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist, overflowing with subtle visual poetry, providing a seamless transition into a bohemian neighborhood of artists and misfits bordering the sea. A meditative portrait of outsiderism and urban isolation, this film lingers, like many of Varda’s films, on fictionalized women who end up alone, often in the company of strangers who drift in and out of their lives, typically played by nonactors, who sometimes repel and sometimes attract them, with none more compelling than the stubborn determination of Sandrine Bonnaire’s homeless teenage hitchhiker in Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) (1985), perhaps the most important film in Varda’s career, seen through the eyes of many people, a wrenching portrait of bleak desolation. Here the protagonist is played by Sabine Mamou, an editor for both Varda and Jacques Demy in the 80’s, appearing in her lone acting role as Emilie Cooper, a French woman who floats through California’s Venice Beach with her young son after a devastating breakup, still obsessed by her immediate past which she cannot detach herself from, flooded by a sense of anguish and nostalgia, with a free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness voiceover, “bodies separated…words…shattered phrases,” existing in her own existential space of wandering, loneliness, and erotic dreams. In a moment of brilliant intertextuality, Emilie is hired by a documentary crew to narrate a film in French about the city’s outdoor murals, cleverly integrating herself into her own film, where the voice heard on the playback happens to be Varda’s, which startles Emilie, not sounding like herself, which they amusingly slough off by saying “No one ever recognizes their own voice.” With excerpted sequences shown in her video memoir Varda by Agnès (Varda par Agnès) (2019), with Varda acknowledging the film is the story of an introverted Los Angeles, while also confessing pure joy in filming real people, this is a film without any real drama, yet what’s inseparable is the little boy by her side, eight-year old Martin (Mathieu Demy, Varda’s own son), who somehow fits the rhythm of the film.
With its meditative tone of muted anguish, this deeply moving, semi-autobiographic portrayal can be described as a first person essay, narrated throughout by none other than actress Delphine Seyrig, the subject of Chantal Akerman’s groundbreaking feminist film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), while also appearing in an assortment of dazzling costume changes in the puzzling Alain Resnais experimental film Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad) (1961), as she can be heard spouting ruminations on words, ideas, sadness, and loss. Offering an immersion of awareness and feeling, Varda adopts a strategy of shooting through windows, with improvised piano outbursts from composer Georges Delerue, 03:22, but when the recorded tapes were discovered damaged after Delerue returned to Paris, the music was actually performed by Michel Colombier in the style of Delerue. A recurring motif seen throughout the film is Emilie working in the seaside home of her employer as a filmmaker’s secretary, sitting at a desk with her back to the camera, typing endless revisions of scripts in front of a window facing the open sea, as people on a surprisingly empty beach drift in and out of the frame, endlessly smoothing the sands, like a Zen garden, picking up every last piece of litter seemingly contaminating the image of perfection, while one lone straggler may be lying on a towel catching the rays, always seen off in the distance, with wistful and serene beach shots that foreshadow The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès) (2008). Something should be said about Mamou, as she lays it all on the line, offering a very vulnerable performance as the stand-in for the director herself, getting at the emotional core of what the film is trying to say, accentuating the dreary confinement of working mothers who cannot escape the regimented daily routine. First off, there are the faces, with Nurith Aviv’s camera creating an interactive montage of blank, lonely faces which “seem more real than what’s conveyed by words,” as they wordlessly play out in a series of street encounters. Bridging the language barrier, many visitors in foreign lands often find themselves reading faces, as it’s a universal language, where the captured moods can be so expressive. At one point, Varda’s camera wanders into the midst of a domestic dispute, with the couple hurling insults at one another, turning into a shoving match, where you never know at any moment if it will spill out of control, yet she’s looking at the world with fresh eyes. Mother and son often wander through the streets exploring the neighborhood, including a fishing bridge, a snack shop, a walk along the beach, and a Mexican street festival featuring mariachi bands, encountering not only the famous boardwalk and its roller skaters, but also homelessness, crime, unemployment, and unwanted furniture left on sidewalks, caught up in the collective swell of the city’s distinctly different cultural characteristics, overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, where Martin’s wearing a T-shirt that reads “My Mom & Dad went to California but all I got was this dumb T-shirt.” In this sense, the film resembles Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), where a fictional character wanders through live footage of the street violence erupting at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, when protesters gathered to demonstrate against the continuing war in Vietnam and ended up being assaulted by the police. Varda’s film on the other hand explores a world of foreigners and transients, featuring a stream of working class people from all walks of life, seen as a melting pot for various immigrant groups, where as the playback suggests, her films beg the question, does art imitate life, or does life imitate art?
Emilie struggles to find lodging, living temporarily in multiple residences, with her belongings scattered, and is seen wandering through the neighborhood, eventually finding a non-descript, box-like home situated in a complex with other similarly built homes, where the camera often finds moments of Martin playing on his own, where he’s free to roam, left unsupervised for long stretches, seen playing on his skateboard, yet often caught wandering through the maze-like labyrinth of corridors between apartment buildings, where there are also moments he finds himself desperately alone, pleading to sleep in his mother’s bed, needing reassurance for the anxieties felt within. His feeling mirrors the overwhelming depression and sense of grief engulfing Emilie from the breakup, where she has to calmly put up a front for her son as a means of protecting him, not wanting to share too much, or allow him to sense her own growing desperation. “We do and undo,” Emilie says in voiceover, a poignant reflection on the exasperating cycle of romantic relationships, commonplace tasks, and parent-child attachments. Taking the path of an objective documentary, the work is a constructed fiction, but more than that it is an autobiographical investigation of self, including precisely motivated moments of reverie that include voluptuous nudity of both sexes, with naked fantasies of her absent husband Tom (Tom Taplin), where the camera lingers on his naked frame, yet she no longer knows what her own body is, and carefully works to rediscover it. Sabine Mamou has a beauty that is certainly not classic, yet has an irresistible and penetrating charm, with one of the more erotic scenes in cinema, receiving a phone call, but leaves the phone off the hook before moving into the bedroom in the empty home of her employer where she removes her clothes and is seen lying naked on the bed, viewing herself in a mirror, creating a fractured image in the reflection, as she adapts her gaze to her own body, offering a distinctly feminine gaze where there are no ulterior motives. The naked and distorted image is much like the poetic narration, where words are strung together like pieces of a puzzle in search of some kind of meaning. This is a Varda film that sneaks up on you, offering a rare glimpse of intimacy, finding herself at a stage in her life when she’s at her saddest and most vulnerable, with no pretense of optimism or happiness, making this one of her more challenging works, suggesting the subject of women is a recent invention in the world of cinema, where critics traditionally have paid too little attention. A handful of cinematographers were used in this film, just shooting on the weekends, picking up shots and filling it in with this story about a woman we get to observe. While it’s not flashy by any means, and might even be considered brooding in nature, but it is emotional, told honestly and truthfully, which is the ethos of her work. Varda has been making radical films for over half a century, and has resisted norms of representation while creating a personal repertoire of images, characters, and settings, all of which provide insight into broader cultural and political contexts, always rooted in moments of intimacy and tenderness toward the lives she is depicting, yet inexplicably when Cahiers du Cinéma published special editions in 1980 on French cinema two years running, they omitted her entirely. They included Catherine Breillat, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Akerman and others, but Varda was excluded without even a footnote. It should be pointed out that the French New Wave was nearly exclusively an all-male collective, with their homages and critiques of Hollywood styles and conventions that Varda completely disassociated herself from, making films that never made money and defy categorization, but exhibit far more heart and compassion, DOCUMENTEUR |1981| VOSTFR ~ WebRip Rare - Dailymotion YouTube (4:27).
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