Just a Game?

CINEMA GUILD
Agnès Varda in The Beaches of Agnès

The things that you lose in the course of a long life, and the things you might somehow hold on to, are the stuff of Agnès Varda's latest essay film--"stuff" being a clunky word to apply where this innately elegant artist is concerned but also inescapable, since she likens her method in this film to dumping the contents of a purse.

Out tumble lint, valuables, makeup, mementos, business receipts, scraps of notepaper and pieces of identification, official and otherwise. Some of this accumulation, such as the family snapshots, might belong to any grandmother, as I think Varda would admit. Having dedicated a significant part of her work to making common cause with other women, she readily counts herself among their company. That said, though, she knows her career within this collectivity has been singular, and so are most of the odds and ends she pours out before the viewer. Founding member and sole woman of the French New Wave, witness to radical social movements and sometimes their abettor, entrepreneur, traveler, friend to a long list of artistic geniuses, she in effect brings out of her purse more than fifty years' worth of assorted and idiosyncratic film clips, portrait photographs and snatches of music, not to mention some recently gathered views of places she's known.

"A puzzle," she calls her life's materials as she sorts and arranges them, "with a hole in the center." Or, to switch to the metaphor of her new film's title, the assemblage she makes looks like a meeting place of the elements, continually forming and slipping away: The Beaches of Agnès.

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