Jacques Rozier: Dream vacations run aground

Photo by
Raymond Cauchetier.

While Godard remains the only one of the internationally famous French New Wave filmmakers to still be with us, a lesser-known French filmmaker whose work in the late Fifties and early Sixties was distinctly in line with the “nouvelle vague” (both the Cahiers posse and the Left Bank group) is still alive at 95. Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1962) is the greatest New Wave film to never receive a single legal release on U.S. DVD or Blu-ray (or even VHS), but his later lengthy comedies are just as worthy of study — and just as unavailable in the U.S.

This piece will not be a survey of Rozier’s life and career, but rather an in-depth exploration of the four fiction films of his that are available in France on DVD and are thankfully now all on the Rarefilmm site. Adieu Philippine is most definitely the masterpiece in the bunch, but the three comedy features that followed possess a charm and a deadpan notion of (Rozier’s favorite theme) things falling apart that makes them very unique farces.

Younger Rozier.

Although Rozier’s 1955 comic short about a precocious schoolboy, “Rentree des classes” is delightful, the true prelude to Philippine is Rozier’s short “Blue Jeans,” which qualifies as an early New Wave short, as it was released in 1957. All the hallmarks of the movement are there: real locations, innovative camerawork, editing (mostly wipes here) to move the plot along, the behavior of young people as the subject, and “empty” moments where the characters contemplate their future.

The films follows two young men in Cannes — Rozier offering a preliminary version of a theme he loves, namely people on vacation. The boys wander the city and the beach trying to pick up girls, but when they get them they have neither the money to romance them properly nor the savoir faire to move it to the “next level.”

Rozier employs an older-sounding narration to voice the thoughts (in past tense) of one of the young men. The age in the voice convinces us that, while this short was shot in the present tense, the events are being pondered by an older man remembering his youth. (Rozier, like the other New Wavers, was around 30 when he made his filmmaking debut.)

His feature debut, Adieu Philippine (watch it on Rarefilmm) is indeed his best-known film. The film contains all of the facets that New Wave debut features have, plus it has a wonderful musical soundtrack consisting of original compositions by Jacques Denjean, Paul Mattei, and Maxime Saury, pop songs, and some irresistible (to the characters and us) cha-cha music.

The film’s plot is beautifully structured. The most commonplace aspect of it — two young women (Stefania Sabatini, Yveline Céry) are in love with one young man (Jean-Claude Aimini) — is complemented by the fact that the young man knows that he’s about to be “called up” for military service in Algeria (during the Algerian War, a conflict that was not supposed to be mentioned in French films).

This serious element serves as a brilliant counterpoint to the mostly light-hearted tone of the film, which is emphasized in the second half from the shift in location — the lead Parisian trio go on a Club Med vacation to Corsica. In the final scenes, the girls begin to truly suffer over their “shared” love of the boy, and the boy finally registers his uncertainty at going off to war.

Thus, Philippine is an apparently light romantic comedy that has a barely concealed serious subtext. This is particularly fascinating in light of the fact that the film falls into the “two carefree girls” subgenre of New Wave film, which stretches from Godard’s “Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick” (1959) to Rivette’s masterwork Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974).

Rozier added flavor to his tale of young people by hiring non-professionals for the three lead roles. They are all surprisingly good and lend an air of awkwardness and authenticity to their roles.

The visual experimentation that Rozier utilized in “Blue Jeans” is used wonderfully here, as the wipes — and jumpcuts and fades — again convey the movement of time, while the film’s most memorable musical sequence has the camera serving at one point as the “dance partner” for one of the girls (Céry). 

As a cha-cha tune plays, she dances with us, staring into the camera, providing the sort of bond with the viewer that characterized the famous moment in Monika (1953) by Bergman where Harriet Andersson looks straight into the camera (as Godard had Karina do in Vivre Sa Vie).

The film’s release was delayed for a few years. It was shot in 1960 and was to be edited and released in ’61. There was a major problem, however — the sound was missing from various scenes, and so Rozier had to lip-read what the characters said, since he had allowed his non-pro leads to largely improvise their dialogue.

Godard was a great admirer of Rozier’s (see below), to the extent that he introduced him to the producer Georges de Beauregard. Unfortunately, Rozier didn’t get along with Beauregard; it is noted in Rozier’s French Wikipedia bio that Rozier’s feud with the producer was one reason he was considered “the enfant terrible of the New Wave.” Philippine came out without Beauregard’s name on it, and in a version that had been reedited by Rozier from the initial cut intended for release, approved by the producer. 

Rozier may not have been a writer for the Cahiers or a Left Bank storyteller, but his work was very warmly received by two of the most outspoken of the “nouvelle vague.” Francois Truffaut’s review proclaimed: “You will not find a single unusual frame in Adieu Philippine, not a single camera trick, and neither will you discover a single false note nor any vulgarity. Nor will you find ‘poetic moments’; the film is an uninterrupted poem. Its poetry could not emerge clearly from looking at rushes; it arises from any number of perfect harmonies between images and words, sounds and music.” [Truffaut, The Films in My Life, 1978, Simon & Schuster, pp. 324-325]

Godard declared Philippine to be one of his ten favorite films of 1963, and wrote about “Blue Jeans”: “Here the truth of the document makes common cause with the grace of the narration. True are the two layabouts who patrol Cannes on scooters in search of girls; graceful the long tracking shots along the Croisette or the rue d’Antibes, boldly edited one after the other in direct cuts. True the dialogue and attitude; graceful the realism of the photography and the shutters which poetically scan the afternoon on the warm sand…. It is a film about time passing — in doing what? In exchanging kisses. So its moral, both gay and sad, is that of Louis Aragon’s quatrain:

In the crossways of kisses/The years pass too quickly/Beware beware/Shattered memories.”

[Godard, Godard on Godard, ed: Milne, 1972, The Viking Press, pp. 114-15]

Uncle Jean’s opinion of Philippine was pithier: “Quite simply the best French film of these last years.”

Regardless of these raves, the film failed at the box office. It took nearly a decade for Rozier to produce his second fiction feature. In the years between he directed shorts and several original TV programs, many of which were about music (popular and classical) and fashion. A bunch of these shorts can be found on the “underside” of the Internet. Most are not available with English subs, but a few are.

The two earliest shorts (mentioned above) are both included in the French box set with English subtitles; two others, “Dans le vent” (an early Sixties short about the fashion trend of women wearing capes) and the extremely silly “Nono Nenesse” (a 1970s pilot for a TV show where four adult actors, including noted comic performers Jacques Villeret and Bernard Menez, played precocious babies) are also available with English subtitles on the Net  (although the latter barely needs any).

Three of the best of Rozier’s interim documentaries have been included on Criterion discs. “Paparazzi” and “Bardot et Godard” (both 1964) are on the Contempt release — both were authorized by Godard to show the making of the film, with the former focusing on the many photographers trying to get even a telephoto glimpse of Bardot, the latter showing some location footage and explaining the film’s plot and themes. Rozier’s full-length 1964 doc about the legendary Jean Vigo for the “Cinéastes de notre temps” series is included on the Complete Jean Vigo collection on Criterion. (My review of the set is here.)

The subsequent, lengthy comedy features by Rozier are, as noted above, included in the French box set and on the Rarefilmm site. The first of these is the epic-length (for a comedy) Du côté d'Orouët (watch it on Rarefilmm), which is the most “immersive” of Rozier’s comedies crafted in the documentary style. Shot on 16mm for French TV in 1969, the film was never shown on television and was released to theaters four years later.

No dubbing or visual effects for Rozier — he shot Orouët in a candid style with direct sound. All the better to convey the realistic side of a journey to the Atlantic coast by three young women who are looking for diversions from city life.

These ladies giggle. A lot. They in fact spend a great deal of the first two-thirds of the film giggling at various situations. Joëlle (Danièle Croisy) is our initial focus of attention, as we see her at her white-collar office job. She has been invited on vacation by her friend Kareen (Françoise Guégan), who has the ability to share with cousin Caroline (Caroline Cartier) a family beachfront house in the coastal town of Saint Gilles Croix de Vie. Shortly into their visit, the girls are joined by nerdy Gilbert (Bernard Menez), Joëlle’s coworker, who has a pretty evident crush on her.

Gilbert becomes the central figure in the film, with Kareen and Caroline teasing and taunting him, and Joëlle being oddly cold. The film’s tone shifts at the hour and 45 minute mark (Orouët runs a full 154 minutes) when Joëlle is openly seen as being miserable at the dinner table. Rozier studies the antic behavior of the three girls and Gilbert up until then, and his documentary approach (documentary conveying a “serious” tone to most viewers) does blend in an unusual fashion with the light-hearted silliness.

The last half-hour finds the vacation falling apart, as the girls lose their taste for the local life by the beach and Gilbert finally snaps — after preparing a big dinner that no one eats, he finally notes to Kareen that “you take me for an imbecile.” This rebellion is cemented in the final, “turnaround” scene where we are back in Paris and Joëlle watches at a restaurant as her new coworker flirts with Gilbert, while she (Joëlle) laments how uncertain her future is.

Menez featured
on the DVD release.

The above sounds like quite a lot of plot, but it is actually conveyed in a very short span of time. One comes away from Orouët thinking of it as a tale of a man who has been (latter 20th-century phrase) “friend-zoned” by the object of his affection and can find no way out. (This was further underscored by the fact that Menez went on to have a successful career as a confused “nice guy” comic actor in TV and movies.)

Orouët does rework the notion behind Philippine: that “happy summer vacation” movies can have dramatic subplots lurking behind the carefree images of girls in swimsuits. Rozier continued to explore vacations that go awry in his next two comedy features. 

Watching Rozier’s lengthy comedies one is struck by his desire to create humor in a deadpan fashion by shooting the most farcical sequences in real time. This sense of “real duration” comedy that lasts longer than that in conventional farces (which run 80–100 minutes tops) is quite a tall order for a filmmaker, and only one other filmmaker in my opinion has undertaken it and succeeded; Jean Rouch in the several-hour version of Petit a Petit (1970), about African dignitaries who visit Paris to find out how to properly build skyscrapers. (This version is rarely exhumed, but I saw it at Anthology Film Archives many years ago.)

Orouët was indeed Rozier’s longest comedy, but his next feature, The Castaways of Turtle Island (1976; watch it on Rarefilmm), has the most solid comedic premise: A travel agent comes up with a “Robinson Crusoe” getaway where the customers go to a desert island and live by their wits.

The travel agent is played by the great French comic actor Pierre Richard, who by the time of Castaways was already famous, having made The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972). Rozier was asked to dream up a vehicle for Richard, who was eager to work with Rozier but who had to move on to a different project at a certain point — therefore, an odd twist near the end of the film where his character disappears for several scenes and then is revealed to have been jailed.

As with all of Rozier’s features, Castaways has an episodic structure, in which Richard and chubby, jovial Jacques Villeret function as a comedy team, running the vacation in a wholly incompetent manner. The passengers initially like the idea of being adventurous, but they soon grow tired of Richard’s odd demands — for example, he stipulates that they must swim from boat to shore as they approach the island, since Crusoe was the survivor of a shipwreck. Thus, their boat can’t neatly dock at their destination.

A passenger who remains interested is Julie (Caroline Cartier), a press attaché whom Rozier utilizes as a narrator in the last third of the movie. This might have been because of Richard’s “disappearance” from the plot or because a “joining” device was needed to guide the viewer, since Rozier had no completed script for the film and allowed the actors to improvise.

The scenes that work best are the ones in which Richard imparts his castaway “logic” to the passengers. The scenes that don’t quite gel are an introductory subplot about Richard cheating on his girlfriend with a Brazilian woman (which runs the first 20 minutes of the picture and amounts to nothing in terms of the story as a whole) and some of the sequences at the end of the journey, where Villeret and Cartier nearly become a romantic couple.

Rozier is quite skilled at shifting the tone of his films. Even so, the chubby and playful Villeret seems like a very odd choice as the would-be Crusoe who does indeed know what he’s doing on the desert island — and thus seems desirable to the press attaché.

As had happened with Rozier’s two preceding features, Castaways had a troubled post-production period, after an eight-week in Guadeloupe and Dominica. The producers didn’t like Rozier’s improvisatory method of filming and the large amount of footage he shot. It took two years before he had a final cut assembled, and the film ultimately failed at the box office, despite Richard’s enthusiasm for the project from start to finish.

As it stands, Castaways has some great scenes and memorable images, and it leads the way to Rozier’s next comedy, Maine Ocean (1986).

Maine Ocean (watch it on Rarefilmm) is the closest thing to a conventional French farce that Rozier ever made, but it still has all the hallmarks of his style, from documentary filming techniques to deadpan comedy rendered in “real duration.” The difference, here, however, is that the filmmaker didn’t concentrate his energies on delivering a linear storyline — he lavishes attention here on subplots and gets rid of all his main characters save one in the final scene. The characters do take a very linear trip, as is reflected in the title, from the Gare Montparnasse (which is located on the Avenue du Maine in Paris) to the Atlantic Ocean.

The plot, such as it is, starts off with a classic farcical misunderstanding: a Brazilian dancer (Rosa-Maria Gomes) who speaks very little French is accosted on a train by two by-the-books ticket takers (Bernard Menez, Luis Rego) who badger her about not having followed ticket-approval protocols. A French lawyer (Lydia Feld, who also coscripted with Rozier) who speaks Portuguese comes to her aid, and the dancer ends up accompanying the lawyer to one of her trials — a very funny case involving a violent fisherman (Yves Alonso) who believes himself to be easygoing and a victim of circumstances.

In a show of spontaneity that is the norm in Maine Ocean, the lawyer then accompanies the dancer on her cross-country trip to “see the sea” at Les Sables-d'Olonne. (They eventually wind up in a fishing town on Yeu Island.) The newfound friends then re-encounter the two ticket takers and the violent client, all of whom are in love with our heroines.

This ragtag group are joined by a Mexican entrepreneur (a wonderfully over-the-top Pedro Armendáriz Jr.), who believes the Brazilian dancer can sing (which she can’t). He sets in motion the third act, in which there is a delightful scene set in an empty civic center, where the entrepreneur finds out the truth about the Brazilian, and all the characters (including the drunken ticket takers and the equally drunk fisherman) take part in an impromptu dance.

Benez’s ticket taker ends the film alone, taking a circuitous journey home to his wife and kids in Nantes. Although one misses the rest of the cast, his character’s moving from a small boat to a bigger one, back to a smaller one, and then to the smallest of all in the finale to reach the shore makes him perhaps the ultimate Rozier figure — a guy whose vacation fell apart but who has exciting and incredible memories that will last him the rest of his life.

Menez is clearly one of Rozier’s favorite performers (the Wiki photos of Rozier in both his American and French Wiki bios come from an appearance the filmmaker made at a Menez book signing), but the performer that amused this viewer the most is Yves Alfonso, who had showy roles in Godard’s Masculin-Feminin, Made in U.S.A., and Weekend. Alfonso’s staccato-sounding way of speaking (which is actually a regional dialect of French called “Poitou”) and his character’s short temper are great comic devices that make him stand out from the otherwise friendly and low-key characters in the film.

As noted above, Maine Ocean is closer to the “normal” French film farce than any other Rozier picture. Average French farces move along familiar lines — mistaken identity, characters who try to reinforce their lies, role-playing, and the misadventures of dunderheaded comic “types.” The fact that Rozier worked in this, more traditional fashion of emphasizing characters and gags most likely contributed to the film being not only a critical success (all of Rozier’s films had that distinction) but also a modest hit with the public.

The Seventies farces of filmmaker Bertrand Blier, whose dark and absurdist comedies are generally dissimilar to Rozier’s (and who was the subject of a series of 14 episodes on the Funhouse TV show!), bears one strong element in common with Rozier’s humorous films, especially Maine Ocean: the male characters are all idiots and the women possess the clear minds (or at least the rational logic) needed to get things accomplished. Rozier is very different from Blier (and is from an earlier generation of French filmmaking), but their shared fascination for chaos-causing males does unite their comedies.

Perhaps it was the presence of Feld as a co-scripter, but the vacation in Maine Ocean involves no lingering images of women in swimsuits — although the Brazilian does dance in her very skimpy costume in the civic center scene.

Rozier’s work changed a great deal from the late Fifties through the late Eighties, but his visual approach remained the same. One can lament that he was only able to make five feature films in his career (the last being Fifi Martingale in 2001, costarring Alfonso and Feld, who again coscripted). But those films are engrossing models of French farce, delivered in a uniquely realistic manner and with a common theme — sympathetic but harried characters using their “getaway” vacation to prove something to themselves. It’s a very different approach that refreshed an age-old genre.

Rozier in recent years.

I said at the outset of this piece that I would not be discussing M. Rozier’s personal life, but I must at least mention the latest, very sad headline that appeared across the Internet in July of 2021 concerning Rozier. A movement arose to amass many signatures on a petition to get the filmmaker lodging after it was revealed that his landlord was throwing him and his wife (who was ill at the time) out of their apartment.

This is a very sad development, which is explained in English here; the fact that his eviction was occurring as he (age 94!) prepared prints of his films for a tribute to his work at the Cinematheque Francaise was an even unkinder cut. A recent article in English on the Criterion website states briefly that “fortunately, filmmaker and writer Paul Vecchiali came to [Rozier’s] aid.” I could find no confirmation of how Vecchiali helped out Rozier — one must also be aware that Vecchiali himself is currently 92 years old.

If anyone has any additional info or links about what is happening with M. Rozier’s living situation, please let me know in the comments section. In the meantime, I urge everyone to watch the Rozier films that are now available on the Net, and rejoice in the fact that a filmmaker who worked against adverse conditions for most of his career is finally getting his vacation in the sun.

UPDATE (5/23): Thanks much to "Gone to the Movies" for the note verifying that Vecchiali did indeed help out Rozier. The organization mentioned in the Tweet is the Société des Auteurs Réalisateurs Producteurs. It's good to know that old New Wavers are there to help each other out. Bravo, M. Vecchiali!

Thanks to friend and superior cineaste Paul Gallagher and Rarefilmm mastermind Jon Whitehead for help with access to these films. The Rarefilmm site can be found here.

Hitchin’ a Ride: Deceased Artiste Agnès Varda (part 2 of two)

In 1970 Varda’s film Nausicaa was considered unairable by ORTF, the network that commissioned it, and so we have only a rough cut of the film to view. It is available to be seen on the Rarefilmm site.

It’s a blend of documentary and fiction that is very much the sort of film being made by “radicalized” French filmmakers of the time — this mixture was used wonderfully in two brilliant, controversial films, Sweden’s I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967) and Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971). The rough cut of Nausicaa definitely could have used additional editing, but it appears to be a finished work, albeit without credits.

The film is Varda’s most overtly political, concerning the military dictatorship of “the Colonels” in Greece in the Sixties; she referred to Nausicaa as a “settling of accounts” with a “fascist” government. Varda reconnected to her Greek heritage here (her father was Greek), as she did in her short “Uncle Yanco” (1967). Talking heads, including Vasilis Vasilikos (the author of the novel Z), speak about being exiled outside of Greece.

Meanwhile, a fictional plot involves a Greek journalist staying at the apt of two roommates named “Agnès” (France Dougnac) and “Rosalie” (Agnès’ daughter’s name; played by Myriam Boyer, from Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000). As with Lion’s Love, the film is a time capsule of the late Sixties that is valuable for its glimpse at Varda’s politics. One rather timely reflection on military policy is passed on when a character intones that “torture is politics in another form.”

In the book Agnès Varda: Interviews (edited by T. Jefferson Kline, University Press of Mississippi, 2014). Varda speaks in a 1975 interview with Mireille Amiel on the matter of Nausicaa: “We shot the film… But in 1970 France sold a lot of Mirage planes to the colonels, so… The film was never broadcast on French TV. There were invitations from festivals but the film was never sent. No one ever wrote to me about its status…. They paid me, but I didn’t have the rights to the film…. That was the only time I’ve been politically censured.” [p. 72]

A young Gerard Depardieu in Nausicaa.

Varda’s only fiction film in the Seventies was One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), which I will review upon its upcoming re-release on Criterion. One of her most interesting credits from this decade was her credit on Last Tango in Paris (1972). She wrote the French dialogue, which means that she refined the initial dialogue between Brando and Schneider (which Marlon altered and dropped, in place of his own, errant remarks) and between Schneider and Jean-Pierre Leaud, who plays a wonderful satire on a New Wave cinephile-filmmaker who is not attentive to his girlfriend (and future wife).

The very small in scope fiction film Documenteur (1981) was based on her experience of living alone in L.A. (while her marriage was to Demy was broken up) with her son Mathieu. It is available in the U.S. on the Eclipse/Criterion box set Agnès Varda in California. I reviewed the contents of the box here on the Disc Dish website.

Varda’s last two movie masterpieces delved into homelessness and loneliness. The first is the superb fiction film Vagabond (1985), with Sandrine Bonnaire as Mona, a hitchhiking drifter who is found dead at the film’s opening.

Varda directing Vagabond.

In an interview with Francoise Wera in 1985, Varda outlined how she devised the film: “I went to scout out the terrain, if I may put it that way. I picked up hitchhikers, I hung out at the train station, I went into some of the homeless shelters at night, etc. One day I picked up a girl hitchhiking and she was so extraordinary a character that I began to realize how much more interesting it is to see a girl hitchhiking than a guy…. It presupposes more physical courage, more endurance, more guts, a greater capacity to say ‘up yours!’ to people, and that kind of thing.” [ibid, p. 120]

Varda uses a documentary frame for her drama — a device that has now been done to death in “mockumentary” sitcoms but was more unique back in the Eighties. We hear from people who have encountered Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) and have distinct opinions about her, emphasizing one of the film’s unspoken themes — the ways in which one life affects others, even if that life was lived on the margins (and some of the “witnesses” only meet her for a few minutes).

The most moving aspect of the film is that Varda and Bonnaire collaborated to make Mona a sympathetic character who has countless flaws — among them that she can’t be trusted not to steal or disappear and that she is, as one character puts it, “wild and unwashed.” Varda’s own description of the character is that she is “not engaging” but is still very “touching.” [ibid, pp. 142-43]

The film also picks up on the tone of Cleo and Bonheur by exploring the sad and lonely aspects of Mona’s personality. Her fate is predicted by a hippie farmer she meets who reflects on his old friends that stayed on the road, noting that “the loneliness ate them up in the end.”

The script is definitely Varda’s best, as it slowly weaves the “witness" characters together. Thus, what could be a resolutely corny device instead becomes a poignant statement on the fact that the world can be quite small, even if you’re a drifter. And even though they are all, by necessity, supporting characters, we get three-dimensional portraits of the people who comment on Mona’s life. One of the most striking is a middle-class tree expert, played by Macha Meril (Godard’s A Married Woman). Varda commented on the character in a 1986 interview by Barbara Quart:

“… later on she has a guilty feeling that she should, she could, have done more. To tell the truth, I don’t know what more she could have done. I don’t think she was ready to adopt that vagrant — who, by the way, would not have been pleased to be adopted. So sometimes a film pushes toward the wall where we have to face the limits of our vague understanding, vague generosity, and vague not understanding what it’s all about. So I ended up structuring the film into the shape of an impossible portrait.” [ibid, p. 136]

Varda made a few more fiction features, but Vagabond is the last truly great one. One of the factors that make it a timeless piece is Varda’s return to her neo-realist roots, with non-professional actors being used for small parts. The use of such real faces makes the documentary aspect click and attaches us emotionally to Mona, as the dirtied-up Bonnaire fits perfectly among the rustics and fellow drifters she plays against.

*****

Varda made entertaining documentaries and essay films for the last quarter century of her life. The one that stands head and shoulders above the rest is The Gleaners and I (2000), which has an intimate visual style, a cast of colorful “characters,” curious tangents, and a timeless theme. The advent of lightweight video cameras made it easier for Agnès to hit the road and pursue her theme by looking for people who live a lifestyle outside of society.

That lifestyle involves living off of the food cast off by others, be they bourgeois in cities who waste large amounts of food (and obey stringent expiration dates calculated to get the customer to buy more products) or the rural landowners whose harvests leave behind lots of uneaten produce.

The theme is broad enough that she is able to discuss the urban homeless problem in Gleaners while also tackling the notion of those who live in trailers in the countryside and — her favorite latter-day obsession, peculiar souls with unusual hobbies and artistic outlets.

As a result, she follows several unforgettably eccentric characters whom another filmmaker would’ve depicted as “desperate” or “people to be pitied.” Varda instead exults in their strangeness and never criticizes them (even those who are clearly on self-destructive paths).

Gleaners struck a chord with viewers in many countries and became the signature film of the last two decades of her life. It also spawned a new fan base for her, who sent her letters and presents and whom she acknowledged in the film’s sequel, The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002).

This sequel, which was included with the original feature on DVD in many countries, led the way to Varda’s final “memoir” documentaries, in which she presented us with an autobiography of sorts while also promoting the work of artists she liked.

Like her trilogy of films about Demy — Jacquot de Nantes, The Young Girls Turn 25, and The World of Jacques Demy — the memoir films are charming but have much less emotional resonance than the films examined above. They all are pleasant viewing experiences but will unfortunately suffer if one plans to “binge” her work and starts with the sublime fiction films, which are indisputably her finest work.

Of course, this is all relative to other filmmakers’ final films, which cast an emotional look backward to youth or middle age, or ponder the mysteries of life with metaphors for the Big Sleep (Fellini’s ladder to the skies is one of the finer ones). Varda’s video memoirs concentrate on beaches and the open road — which is as good a place to end as any.

*****

Two final videos. Both lack English subtitles, but the second is fully comprehensible. The first finds Agnès with a fan — Isabelle Huppert — being interviewed on the radio.

And a wonderfully assembled seven-minute montage of Varda’s themes, visuals, and performers:

Thanks to Paul Gallagher, cinéaste supérieur.

Agnès from 26 to 41: Deceased Artiste Agnès Varda (part 1 of two)

Incorrectly dubbed “the godmother of the French New Wave” and (one she particularly disliked in later years) “the grandmother of the French New Wave,” Agnès Varda wasn’t an inspiration for la nouvelle vague, she was a functioning member of the movement, in “the Left Bank group” with Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Her films existed in dialogue with the works of the other filmmakers, but she was one of them, rather than a remote “mother” figure.

Her own thoughts about her connection to the group can be found in the book Agnès Varda: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2014): “I was in the wave of the New Wave…. The baton was passed on in that way with some common tendencies, like making low-budget films with characters walking through the streets of Paris.” [pp. 116-17]

Her status as the only woman filmmaker in the group distinguished her, but what one is most struck by when seeing her films in a row is that they fell into two distinct categories: the documentaries, which had an optimistic, playful air, and her fiction features, which were downbeat and very honest about the emotional toll of loneliness and falling in and (more devastatingly) out of love.

She shared with the other New Wave filmmakers a knowledge of, and a passion for, the other art forms (she became a cinephile only after she made her first feature). Her background as a photographer informed her films, to the degree that one is still startled by the compositions and the way in which she favored both arresting montages that moved the pilot forward and leisurely traveling shots that provided atmosphere and indicated the duration of her characters’ journeys.

Varda’s fiction filmography was quite unique among the New Wave because her films belonged to different genres (and approaches to drama). She only made films when she wanted to — she was a working photographer throughout most of her life, and so made movies solely when she had a new story to tell.

One of the ways in which Varda was a pioneering figure is that she was the first to make a fiction feature (Resnais, Marker, Rivette, and Rohmer had already made their first shorts). La Pointe Courte, made in 1954, is most certainly the work of a talented photographer, as its narrative is primarily conveyed by the images.

It’s a hybrid work. One strand of the film overlaps with the work of the Italian Neo-realists — which Varda swore she never encountered until her editor on the film, Alain Resnais, pointed out the similarity of her work to films by Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni. This strand follows the daily lives of fishermen who catch shellfish in a lagoon that has been declared off-limits by the government (because its fish might be poisoned). These segments of the film are precise and documentary-like, and are the first time that Varda demonstrated one of her trademarks — finding amazing faces with which to tell her story.

The other strand concerns a woman (Silvia Monfort) who visits the small seaside town to tell her lover (an incredibly young and thin Philippe Noiret) that she wants to break up with him. These segments are the opposite of the neo-realist fishermen scenes and are instead filled with beautiful compositions — Varda was first and foremost a photographer until the Sixties — and some overripe dialogue (“We’ve lost the youth of our love.”).

Said Varda about this strand in the film: “I didn’t make it easy for the spectator to identify with them in a ‘warm’ way. Thus the coldness is the distance that I wanted between them and the audience. And one senses the photography since when one feels distance he becomes a voyeur and one looks at the image itself.” [ibid, p. 62.]

The scenes featuring the lovers are truly fascinating, in that they have the same tone as later parodies of Bergman – except, of course, for the fact that the classic Bergman visual style (and Antonioni’s equally “alienated” visuals) had not been forged in ’54 when Varda made La Pointe Courte. Bergman had already started his stylization with Summer Interlude (1951), Summer with Monika (1953) and Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) but was still rooted in more conventional modes of melodrama. 

Varda even uses the famous “two faces as one” diptych composition (with one subject turned to the side, as the other looks straight ahead) that became a signature shot in Bergman’s Persona (1966). Varda wasn’t quoting other films here, so she most surely was quoting photography (she was a working photographer at the time she made the film) and classical art (she studied at the School of the Louvre for four years).



The photographic quality of the visuals and the extremely melodramatic dialogue in Pointe makes for the kind of mannered filmmaking that is now drubbed by oh-so-hip film theorists, critics, and fans, but Varda’s sincerity is what “sells” the film, as uneven and schizophrenic as it is. She is clearly not kidding, and the experimentation she undertook led to the unforgettable visuals in her finest films.

Eight years later, Varda’s second feature, Cleo from 5 to 7, was released. Cleo is a work of assured brilliance that remains one of her best-known films. While its visuals mark it as a “Sixties movie,” the assured direction, soundtrack, and storytelling make it a timeless work that looks backward to French and American dramas of the Thirties and Forties but also ahead to the low-key character studies made by independent filmmakers in the years to follow.

Her masterstroke with Cleo is the way in which the title character (played by Corinne Marchand) is sketched. As the film begins, she is a self-absorbed pop singer whose life is subsidized by a sugar daddy character we (and she) see only briefly. By the midpoint of the film, though, we sympathize with her as she awaits the results of a test for cancer.

She is radiantly pretty and incredibly spoiled, but Varda’s camera assumes her POV as the film moves on — in quiet, beautifully shot scenes where she wanders the streets and cafes of Paris — thus softening our perspective on the character. Varda noted: “From the looked-at subject she becomes the looking subject.” [ibid, p.73] “… the entire dynamics of the film centers on the moment this woman refuses to be this cliché, on the moment when she no longer wants to be looked at, but wants instead to look at others and becomes the looking subject.” [p. xiii]

Her bonding with a nerdy soldier (Antoine Bourseiller) waiting to go to the Algerian War makes her fully sympathetic, as he, too, is facing possible death and has no control over the situation. And the way she eventually learns of the test result is so arbitrary and tossed off by the doctor that one definitely gets the feeling of chance ruling all our lives.

The sequence that links Cleo decisively to the other debut features of the New Wave is the moment when Cleo watches a silent comedy with a friend. The cast of the film-within-a-film includes Jean-Luc Godard, his muse Anna Karina, Eddie Constantine, and Jean-Claude Brialy.

Varda’s next feature was the equally tightly scripted Le Bonheur (1965), a devastating depiction of a thoroughly “ideal” family. The visuals are superb, but even more impressive is the economy of Varda’s storytelling and the beautiful way she delivers each character’s perspective.

The film integrates visual experimentation into the story of a happy family. Francois, a young husband-father (Jean-Claude Drouot) travels to another city for work and falls in love there. He believes his happiness has been doubled, but we know that his newfound formula for bliss will harm one of the women he loves (never mind his two kids). His girlfriend in the other town (Marie-France Boyer) is aware that he’s married, but when his wife learns about the other woman things are changed forever, and the “perfect family” is transformed (but looks and behaves pretty much the same — one of Varda’s more brilliant strokes).

While this tale is being told, Varda utilizes a palette of primary colors, fading to these colors in between scenes. She also uses the same graceful camerawork that was in her first two features, with the camera pirouetting around the characters.

Varda was thus experimenting visually as Godard was at the same time, but in the service of telling a very linear story. What does the story mean? Those who look to connect the lives of artists to their work could relate the film's plot to the fact that Jacques Demy, Varda’s husband, was bisexual, and thus Le Bonheur can be seen as a covert allegory about sharing one’s lover and the inevitable heartache that must occur. (In her 2008 film The Beach of Agnès, she revealed that the split between the two around the turn of the Eighties occurred because Demy left her for a man.)

Le Bonheur brings up issues about the Varda-Demy union. First is the unspoken fact that Varda’s output was more consistently top-notch. After The Pied Piper (1972), Demy lost his footing and recovered it only once with the uneven but absorbing Une Chambre en Ville (1982). The films that are not available in the U.S. on disc are indeed remarkably disappointing, from A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973) to the dismal Orpheus update titled Parking (1985) and Three Seats for the 26th (1988). (I made a point to see each rarity when they played at a complete Demy-fest at the Film Forum a few years back, and the effect is that of a very sad and a very steep downslide in quality.)

The other factor relates to the tone of their work. As can be easily seen, Varda placed melancholy and loneliness at the forefront in her films, while Demy’s upbeat, beautifully designed masterworks of the Sixties have an underpinning of great sadness that lurks behind even the happiest of veneers. For instance, his happiest-ever musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), has a jarring subplot in which a murderer is on the loose in the town. Varda’s best films are, by comparison, “smaller than life,” with sadness placed front and center. There is thus a greater sense of illusory fantasy in Demy’s films and a reservoir of true emotion in Varda’s.

Those who prefer looking at an artist’s work on its own, without connections to the author’s life, will see in Le Bonheur a knowing comment on the “free love” concept (which hadn’t reached its peak “summer of love” visibility yet but had indeed been a part of the “beat” lifestyle for several years before the film). It also is a way of bringing attention to the lives of supporting characters in a drama – although Francois feels certain that his having two loves makes everyone happy, we are constantly aware that there are other people who will be affected by his decision (and the wife, whose seamstress business is run from the family apartment, is a supporting character who is seminal to the plot but gets less screen time than the lover).

To make the film even more complicated on a dramatic level, Varda took the unusual step of casting a real couple – Jean-Claude and Claire Drouot — and their kids as the family in the movie. This is discussed in the supplements on the French DVD release of the film. Jean-Claude was a professional actor, best known for a French action TV series titled “Thierry la Fronde.” He happily notes in a present-day interview with Varda (conducted in 2006) that he has been married to Claire for 42 years. He says that “paradoxically, the film has invited us to succeed as a couple and family.” He also notes that his character was indeed “selfish” about his own desire.

Claire was a non-professional who was cast by Varda to create an air of verisimilitude. She notes that her personal reaction to the plot was “I just [hoped] it wouldn’t happen to me!” The startling ending of the film, where the husband’s mistress is now his wife and she participates in an idyllic picnic with Francois and the children, was discussed by Varda in interviews. Most viewers take the scene in which the wife is found drowned to mean that she committed suicide because of her husband’s newfound love. Varda, in fact, left open the fact that she might have died by accident. Boyer says that she thinks “[the wife] just fell in,” but Claire Drouot, who played the role, responds quickly, “I don’t!”

Varda's next feature, Les Creatures (1966), is a fascinating work and yet doesn't quite gel for me, so it will factor into future discussions of her work and not this one. It does, however, illustrate the point about Varda's features being unalike — Les Creatures is a sci-fi scenario that was, as she once noted, the one film she made that had major French stars in it (Deneuve and Piccoli —the latter also starred in her equally adventurous but uneven One Hundred and One Nights) and was her biggest flop at the box office.

Varda and Demy both made features in L.A. in the late Sixties while both were there to discuss making studio-backed films. Demy did indeed get a contract — his Model Shop (1969) is a sorta-sequel to Lola that has some wonderful views of L.A. at the time it was made. Varda went her own way and did an independent feature funded by producer Max Raab.

The resulting film, Lion’s Love (1969), is one of her most curious creations, a time capsule of the period it was made in that it is filled to capacity with ideas and statements about art in the movie capital of the U.S. Varda’s own, stalled conferences with studio execs are presented as problems endured by legendary underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke, who plays a variation on herself (but enduring Agnès’ real-life problems).

I’ve written about the film twice and so I will include here my summation of Lion’s Love in a review of the Eclipse box of Varda’s California films, as it appeared on the Disc Dish website.

The centerpiece of the box is the wonderfully messy fiction film Lions Love (… and Lies) (1969). Feeling inspired by the times, Varda made a Warhol-esque (or, more accurately, a Morrissey-esque) improvised feature. The resulting time capsule is by turns abrasive and brilliant.

The plot, such as it is, involves a menage a trois between three hippies, played by the co-librettists and lyricists of Hair, Jerry Ragni and Jim Rado, and Warhol superstar Viva. They are visited by underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke (playing herself), who is in L.A. to make a deal with a major studio to shoot her first mainstream movie.

It is never expressly stated onscreen, but the most intriguing aspect of the picture is that Varda let loose three NYC chatterboxes in sunny, laidback L.A. The above-mentioned “plot” is nowhere as interesting as the film’s many tangents, which include a number of car trips in which we get an eye-catching view of L.A. in 1968 — thus linking Lions Love to Model Shop (1969), the contemporaneous film by Varda’s husband Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) that also gives the viewer a terrific driving tour of Southern California.

Movie buffs in particular will be fascinated by the Hollywood car-tour sequence narrated by film historian Carlos Clarens, which includes an amazing exploration of the posters and stills available in Larry Edmunds Bookshop.

The most valuable segment of the film, though, is one that was not anticipated while the film was initially conceived: our three loquacious protagonists wind up glued to their TV, watching the news coverage of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the ensuing TV tributes to Kennedy, and his televised funeral. Given the way that celebrity deaths are now covered in the era of 24/7 news networks, it’s chillingly prescient to hear Viva say at one point that our “national pastime is televised death.”

To be continued…

As a finale for this part of the entry, I give you a video posted just the other by Varda’s production company, Cine-Tamaris, a compilation of Agnes dancing (yes, there will be disco!):