Vagabond (1985)

Sans toit ni loi, France / UK, 105 minutes

Director/writer: Agnes Varda

Photography: Patrick Blossier

Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz

Editors: Patricia Mazuy, Agnes Varda

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Meril, Stephane Freiss, Laurence Cortadellas, Marthe Jarnias, Yolande Moreau, Joel Fosse

In some ways it feels like director and writer Agnes Varda grew more carefree and even whimsical over the course of her career. In this century she made gentle, freewheeling, perpetually curious documentaries like The Gleaners & I and Faces Places. By contrast, 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7 is about a young woman awaiting results of a biopsy. Vagabond, between them, is about Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), a runaway girl in rural France who finally dies of exposure—a sad and foredoomed story. Mona’s body is discovered at the beginning of the picture and the rest is flashback types of episodes. They follow the last months of her life as she hitchhiked from place to place, set up her tent, and lived her life as she could. These scenes are ostensibly based on journalistic interviews of those who interacted with and knew her—to the degree, of course, that anyone knew her. Varda’s instinct is often to go at least semi-documentary in tone.

We never see Mona in the home she ran away from. The picture is silent on her life before. We don’t hear from her family in these supposed interviews and we never hear why. Perhaps they just didn’t want to speak with interviewers, but it’s never explained. Varda is more interested purely in Mona’s life on her own and how she survives (and doesn’t) rather than potential details of domestic abuse and such. There is one scene here where it appears Mona is going to be assaulted at one of her campsites, but the picture quickly cuts away and we never hear anything of it again. It’s as if Varda wants us to know she’s aware of all the dangers of Mona’s life, but doesn’t want to dwell on them too much, doesn’t want the lurid details to distort what she wants us to see in Mona.

Faces Places (2017)

This documentary is a collaboration between Agnes Varda and JR, who travel the French countryside in a van that looks like a camera, taking pictures of people and plastering the results giant size on the sides of buildings. Both have established careers as photographers, though Varda's name is likely more associated with filmmaking because she was a key figure in the French New Wave of the late '50s and early '60s with such films as Cleo From 5 to 7. Lately she is better known for documentaries such as The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnes. They are personal, quirky, and charming, and so is Faces Places, which might be my favorite of the three. It's a real collaboration too, as the van, the plastering aesthetic, and a lot of the ideas are JR's. We see them working out some of them here. With over 50 years' difference in their ages, the first surprise in a picture full of them is the kind of working chemistry they establish and maintain. Their sensibilities are well matched. JR's work shades over into realms of graffiti and even vandalism—he's a bit of a French Banksy. He takes the streets as the ultimate art gallery and he likes to work big. His van not only looks like a camera but has a photo booth in the back that churns out prints bigger than life. Cool Aunt Agnes Varda has an appreciation for JR's outlaw instinct but her own is more toward humanity and the pure pleasures of art, which rarely fail this movie. She just wishes JR would take off his shades once in a while. Faces Places is warm, generous, tender, insightful, and often very funny. They go to villages and make portraits of miners, farmers, goats, baristas, the wives of dockworkers, a postman, and more. They find an abandoned village, throw a picnic party, and cover the decaying buildings with faces. They have a sad encounter with Varda's long-time friend and colleague, Jean-Luc Godard. In one sequence they look for a place for an old photograph of Varda's and finally find it on a bunker that has fallen from a cliff onto a beach. The result is beautiful but the next day the elements of wind and tide have completely erased it. But that never stops them, or even discourages them much, and that commitment to the work, doing it and moving on to the next thing, may be the most moving element here. Although it could be the palpable connection they share. Or any of a number of brilliant images and many of the people they meet. It's hard to say because there are so many good things about this movie.

The Gleaners and I (2000)

Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, France, 82 minutes, documentary
Director / writer: Agnes Varda
Photography: Didier Doussin, Stephane Krausz, Didier Rouget, Pascal Sautelet, Agnes Varda
Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz, Isabelle Olivier
Editors: Laurent Pineau, Agnes Varda

The themes in Agnes Varda's turn-of-the-century documentary are equal parts modern-day and ancient, focused on life and waste. Varda sports a digital camera, learning the ways of the technology, complete with snazzy effects (and a goof or two). The picture is concerned on obvious levels with stewardship of the planet and our fellow beings. And it is also about the olden practice of gleaning, scouring fields after harvests for the leftovers that would otherwise be abandoned and rot. A pedantic legal scholar appears at one point, wearing his finery and waving around a red-bound copy of the local penal code, quoting from it, explaining the legalities of gleaning, which have developed over the centuries in France. It is considered a kind of public charity, and apparently grants open access even to private lands, under specific conditions, for the practice.

It's not the only kind of gleaning in this documentary, but it's what Varda shows us first, with a potato field that has been harvested yet still yields hundreds of pounds—many potatoes rejected because they are too big, or the wrong shape, or just because the machinery missed them. Varda spots a heart-shaped potato and claims it for herself, hunting for more, which she puts in a basket and brings home and displays. Then, as this brief film opens up, we see the more modern styles of gleaning, in urban environments, in public markets before and after hours, at informal drop-off / trading sites, with dumpster diving explained and demonstrated, and beyond that suggestions of estate sales, thrift stores, and collecting. Gleaning is an old and even honorable way to get by, and one I can respond to personally as a lifelong consumer of gently used fare.

Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962)

Cléo de 5 à 7, France / Italy, 90 minutes
Director / writer: Agnes Varda
Photography: Paul Bonis, Alain Levent, Jean Rabier
Music: Michel Legrand
Editors: Pascale Laverriere, Janine Verneau
Cast: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dorothee Blanck, Michel Legrand, Dominique Davray, Lucienne Marchand, Serge Korber

The premise of Cleo From 5 to 7 is simple yet evocative, detailing the interval (in the late afternoon of the longest day of the year) during which a young French pop star waits to get the results of a biopsy. Though a good deal of somewhat unlikely incident is packed into its 90 minutes the presentation is close to real time. Made during the heights of the French New Wave, it even includes cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, as if to bear the stamp of an imprimatur. It is certainly as playful as anything made by Godard, moving about a privileged Paris in freewheeling fashion. It may be as programmatic and multileveled as well, with its arch chaptering and indulgences of fashion and music and visuals.

Yet we see these things from a decidedly alternate point of view, through the eyes of someone who wonders if it won't be the last time. Director and writer Agnes Varda brings an unusual perspective for this vein of cinema—a woman's—focusing on the familiar figure of a fictional pop star, Cleo Victoire (Corinne Marchand in her biggest role), who by manner and appearance is straight out of Godard or Antonioni, easily perceived and pigeonholed as beautiful, shallow, vacant, over-privileged, fragile. It was one ideal of the feminine at this point in film, not just in the French and Italian concoctions, but in America too with Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, Natalie Wood. Indeed, the world had been seized at this time by "Pop" (capitalized), which people are still at work unpacking 50 years on. On one level, Agnes Varda's version is just another installment, but one of the best.