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Beaches of Agnes: Returning to the beaches which have been parts of her life, Agnes Varda invents a kind of self-portrait-documentary. Agnes stages herself among excerpts of her films, images and reportages.

Les Plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès)

  • Directed and written by Agnès Varda
  • Starring Agnès Varda
  • Classification: 14A

This is a lovely, quirky and not a little poignant film from Agnès Varda, at 81 the still spry grande dame of the Nouvelle Vague that revolutionized French and world cinema in the late 1950s and early 60s.

Varda has always been a cinéaste with a knack for making movie magic with the most limited means and so she does here in this scavenger hunt/scrapbook of a filmic memoir. As that implies, it's a mish-mash of playfully orchestrated images, moods and textures culled from Varda's own films, picture albums, home movies, still photographs and souvenirs. These, in turn, are intercut with fanciful recreations, visits to key locales in both her life and movies (often the two seem one and the same), as well as fresh footage of her two adult children and their children and much else.

Holding all this together through voice-over and on-screen presence is the mop-topped Varda herself, "playing," as she tells the viewer, "a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative." While you never really know where Varda is taking you from one moment to the next, you're happy to be a sort of virtual flâneur carried by her charming sensibility and impish sense of surprise. I mean, what other film today has a Harrison Ford screen-test, a reminiscence of Jim Morrison, visits to flea markets and walks on the beach, interviews with widows, asides on Fidel Castro, the Black Panthers and Alexander Calder, and a rare appearance by the legendary, reclusive Chris Marker ( La Jetée ), albeit with his voice altered and disguised as a cat? (See the film; it'll make perfect sense.)

The film's most poignant moments come when Varda explores, gently, respectfully, discreetly, her relationship with her husband, fellow director Jacques Demy, best known in North America for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort . Demy, who died of AIDS at 59 in 1990, was/is clearly the love of her life. "All the dead lead me back to Jacques," she says, "the most cherished of the dead."

Les Plages d'Agnès is poignant, too, for what it says about the evolution of movie culture. We may see more movies in more ways than ever - but do these movies matter as Breathless, Les quatre cents coups and Varda's own Cléo de 5 à 7 seemed to matter to audiences a half-century ago? As sweet as Les Plages is, its nostalgia carries an elegiac charge.

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