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4 by Agnes Varda
The Stop Smiling DVD Review
(Criterion)
Friday, January 25, 2008
4 by Agnès Varda
La Pointe Courte (1954)
Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961)
Le Bonheur (1964)
Vagabond (1985)
(Criterion)
Reviewed by Jared Rapfogel
Criterion’s new box-set 4 by Agnès Varda is a treasure trove for enthusiasts of this crucial figure, comprising not only four of her best-known features, but also a host of rare short films and supplementary material. Even the usual making-of featurettes are of special interest since, thanks to her Godard-like dedication to the concept of film-criticism-through-filmmaking, they are often directed by Varda herself. Though Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond have been previously released by Criterion, this is the first appearance on DVD of the fascinating La Pointe Courte and — worth the price of admission — the long-unavailable and unforgettable Le Bonheur, Varda’s strangest and most unsettling film. (If only her great and little-seen 1987 film Kung-Fu Master were included, all would be well in the world…)
Restlessly adventurous and untiringly experimental, Varda long ago established herself as an artist who resists categorization. As one would expect given her mastery and the period in which she made her name, she is often considered a member of the French New Wave. And in some ways this rings true: Her first feature, La Pointe Courte (1954), made several years in advance of the first flowering of the movement, constitutes a radical (if not completely successful) experiment, telling its two essentially unrelated stories via highly disparate, unapologetically clashing styles. Varda uses non-actors and documentary-like methods to portray the daily lives and struggles of the denizens of a provincial fishing town, into which she introduces a troubled married couple, seemingly interlopers from another film, who analyze their relationship in torturous, cerebral, highly elevated dialogue. This confrontation between opposed realities or registers anticipates similar experiments by Godard and Rivette in particular. And Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), released just two years after The 400 Blows, is undeniably a seminal New Wave film, with its jazzy rhythms, which take their cue more from the ebb and flow of lived experience than from the demands of narrative; its bold adoption of quasi-real-time storytelling; and its unparalleled location-photography, an invaluable document of early Sixties Parisian street life.
In and of itself Varda’s enthusiastic and unhesitating experimentation suggests affinities to the New Wave, but far from simply going with the flow of a new movement, Varda’s innovations were firmly rooted in her own sensibility. Unlike Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, et al, Varda was not steeped in film history before she turned to the cinema. A photographer first, she came to filmmaking very much by her own route, and she has continued to make movies more out of a profound curiosity, a desire to explore subjects and approaches, than out of any sense of either embracing or willfully rejecting cinematic traditions.
Following the formal experiments of her first two features, Varda chose to pursue an entirely different direction in her third and arguably greatest film, Le Bonheur (1965). A disarmingly simple story of a young carpenter, blissfully happy with his beautiful and contented wife and child, who meets a similarly beautiful woman in a neighboring town with whom he quickly falls equally in love, Le Bonheur raises deeply troubling questions about the nature of love and of human nature, while maintaining an eerily perfect surface of sunshine and serenity, of vibrant color and tranquil settings. Varda never allows the film’s tone to waver, even as a sense of darkness seeps into the viewer’s consciousness, a darkness never openly acknowledged and therefore all the more insidious. This is a film in which selflessness and selfishness, devotion and monstrousness, are almost indistinguishable.
Vagabond (1985) came twenty years later, and its tone couldn’t be further removed from that of Le Bonheur — a portrait of a female drifter roaming the French countryside, it is a bleak, harsh film, opening with the discovery of the protagonist’s corpse before narrating the events of her final weeks. But Vagabond resembles Le Bonheur in its refusal to spell out its meanings: The film stubbornly withholds explanation. Varda asks us to take her protagonist, Mona, as we find her, a hardened, selfish, emotionally crippled young woman, determined to assert her freedom, but also unwilling (perhaps unable) to form ties of any kind. No backstory is provided, no psychological diagnosis. The achievement of the film is to render Mona, not likable or pitiable (this would make it too easy for us to convince ourselves that we would have acted to change her fate), but profoundly and vividly alive, and her death therefore a tragic waste.
What ultimately unifies the four features in Criterion’s set is not a single visual style or formal approach, not a method of storytelling or a shared tone, but an inclination to experiment with all these elements, and to ask the viewer to adapt to a new and more challenging way of experiencing each film. In La Pointe Courte, this means synthesizing two disparate stories and styles; in Cléo, adapting to a new rhythm and structure; and in Le Bonheur and Vagabond, it means interpreting the films without expecting to be guided every step of the way, as well as facing difficult questions that we all too often evade. 4 by Agnès Varda is a perfect introduction to Varda’s work, a collection of films that demonstrate her devotion to challenging both the audience and herself.