The Beaches of Agnes – a film that gives you the desire to grow old

Read full story in the NYTimes

Agnès Varda, the only female filmmaker associated with the Nouvelle Vague at its high-water mark and now, at 81, an artist of undiminished vigor, curiosity and intelligence. That is certainly how she appears in “The Beaches of Agnès,” her latest film, which opens in New York on Wednesday, after winning a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for best documentary feature in February. Conceived as Ms. Varda’s 80th birthday approached, “Beaches” is a cinematic memoir in two senses: an autobiography rendered in carefully chosen, meaning-rich images and the account of a life lived in, through and for cinema.

There is an elegiac undercurrent to the film — visits to familiar places that have changed over the years, recollections of the dead — but it is not so much concerned with taking stock or summing up as it is with the restless exploration of memory. “I wanted to be like a bird,” Ms. Varda said in an interview one wintry morning in Manhattan a few months ago. “I wanted to be free in my memory, to go from one part to another and see what I would find.” An inveterate collector of odd images and curious ideas — her 2003 documentary, “The Gleaners and I,” is a personal and philosophical inquiry into the practice of gathering what has been discarded or passed over — Ms. Varda composed “Beaches” as a sort of living, moving collage.

~ by mentalimaging on June 28, 2009.