There is a street in the Pointe Courte neighborhood of Sete, a seaside village in Southern France, that is named for Agnes Varda, the French filmmaker who lived there in the '40s with her mother, brothers and sisters in a sailboat anchored to the quay while her father was off at war.
It looks like an ordinary street, and in truth it is. And yet it isn't.
In her first film, 1954's "La Pointe-Courte," it was a path for a pair of lovers, beautiful in their self-absorption, as well as the fishermen, bakers, tailors and the rest who make up a working village. Parallel stories bumping shoulders on the street. That is the gift of seeing life through Varda's lens, the rhythms of every day turn extraordinary.
Two years ago when she was not quite 80, Varda decided to take a second look at that life, and the result is "The Beaches of Agnes," a lovely bit of memory and mischief. You can feel her amusement in the way she's stitched together remnants of her life: Fishing nets and filmstrips are equals here, sand and the past kicking up around her as she walks backward -- literally at times -- then forward again, contemplating, teasing, drawing us close, then closing us off.
One of the seminal filmmakers of the French New Wave, she waded into those experimental waters long ago with those she calls her cinematic brothers -- Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Alain Resnais among them. It was a man's world and she loved it.
That sense of liberation infuses "Beaches." When others might choose to spend their eighth decade spoiling grandchildren and drinking tea (and make no mistake she is doing a bit of that), Varda is clearly still searching for new cinematic shores, and finding them. Packed as the new film is with so many interlocking love stories, of people and places, of ideas and experimentation, it's difficult not to leave the theater giddy at being swept up in her embrace.
Varda says at the beginning of the documentary that when she looks inside people she sees landscapes. Beaches, she explains, would describe her best, starting with the one she is standing on that faces the North Sea near Brussels, where she was born and the family lived until the advancing Germans frightened them into escape.
To help us understand, she is setting up mirrors in the sand. Some gilded, others unadorned, some spotted and in old frames like the director -- I want to be filmed in those, she laughs. The reflections are fragments of Varda, of the film students doing her bidding on that day, of surfers walking by, sailboats in the water beyond. The images are beautiful, incomplete, yet satisfying all the same.
