Agnès Varda was
synthesizing her skills as a photographer and a documentarian as far back as
her debut feature, 1954's La Pointe-Courte, in which she artfully juggles the stories
of a stressed-out vacationing couple and some anxious fishermen. Neither of La
Pointe-Courte's
narratives comes to much, and the couple's soul-searching dialogue becomes
actively grating after a while, but Varda's compositions and camera moves are
stunningly beautiful, and she captures the mundane details of everyday life
with the eye of a fine artist, even when she's just shooting underpants hanging
on a washline. La Pointe-Courte's conflict between realism and expressionism was
so novel that it arguably launched the French New Wave.
Criterion's lovingly
assembled box set 4 X Agnès Varda moves from the fitfully sublime La
Pointe-Courte
to three legitimately great films. In 1962, well into the first crest of the New
Wave, Varda made Cléo From 5 To 7, a real-time study of a budding singing star as
she roams Paris' Left Bank and anxiously (and somewhat melodramatically) awaits
an oncologist's report. Three years later, Varda moved from flat
black-and-white to vivid pastel color with Le Bonheur (a.k.a. Happiness), a cruelly ironic
portrait of a loving young family and its patriarch's attempt to increase his
joy by adding a mistress to the mix. And in 1985, Varda had her most significant
international success in more than two decades with Vagabond, a naggingly elusive
sketch of a naggingly elusive woman, who roams from town to town, taking what
she can and working only when she has to.
At first glance, Vagabond may seem like the odd film
out for this set; it's less florid in style than the others, and was released
well after the era the first three films span. But there's really not much
difference between Sandrine Bonnaire's wastrel character in Vagabond, Corinne Marchand's
self-obsessed chanteuse in Cléo, or Jean-Claude Drouot's greedy husband in Le
Bonheur.
Varda invites the audience to observe these people intimately, but she won't
quite let us like
them, or sympathize. Though her characters seem to speak plainly, Varda
constantly reminds us with her own tricky style that it's possible to say one
thing and mean another.
Key features: Several of Varda's
excellent shorts, plus touching reminiscences with her movies' original casts.