cleo from 5 to 7 (w&d agnès varda)

This film, a little like the Haneke film I recently watched in London, is perhaps another of my Ur-texts. (As might be Performance, so this is a year for the father/mother texts). I would guess I had only seen Cleo once before, but the simplicity and urgency of the filmmaking left its mark. To tell the story of a woman, a character, in 90 minutes, which are more or less 90 minutes of her life, a way of sticking to the unities of time, place and action, is to create a lightning flash of a film, to stop and capture time. Varda’s Cleo has no great profound storyline to pursue. She’s scared she’s got a fatal illness, but we the audience are never sure whether this might be real or part of the drama she creates, part of her beauty and appeal. Aside from this she drifts around Paris, meeting friends and lovers. It’s inconsequential, but that’s part of its charm. Where film narratives seem so dependent on dramatic tropes, Varda resists, letting the star and the camera and the city guide us through the timeline. Indeed, in many ways the film, with the brilliant cinematography of Paul Bonis, Alain Levent and Jean Rabier, is a love letter to Paris, a Paris which still feels like it might be the city of the flaneur, a set on which its inhabitants play out their roles, blessed to be framed against the backdrop the designer has given them. 

visages villages (w&d agnes varda; jr)

It’s impossible not to warm to Agnes Varda, the great survivor. Truffaut has gone, Godard is in hiding, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol all dead, but Varda keeps going. This film, according to IMDB her 52nd as a director, is co-directed with the geekily enthusiastic JR, an interventionist photographer. It sees them criss-crossing her native country, With Varda helping her co-director put up giant photo-murals of common people in the provinces. This showcases Varda’s democratic instincts: the objective of the exercise is to put ‘art’ in places it wouldn’t normally be expected to find a home (the side of a farm shed; the port of Le Havre; a factory). The reflections of ordinary people to the art is fascinating and the directors’ down-to-earth intervention makes a mockery of so much well-intentioned, pretentious attempts to diversity culture’s reach. It really isn’t that hard: get in a van, go to places, and do something which gets the locals involved. 

At the same time, the film is an examination of the relationship between Varda and JR. At one point he takes her to meet his only slightly-older grandmother, whose lack of faculties helps to remind us, in case we needed to be reminded, what a remarkable woman Varda is. There’s something slightly contrived about this strand of the film, not least when they go on an abortive relationship to visit Godard. Here the film skirts over the deeper issue it touches upon, namely Varda’s relationship with death, approaching more rapidly now in the rear view mirror.

Nevertheless Visages Villages  is a relentlessly charming film. Let’s hope it’s far from being her last.