Some things I liked some I did not.

Sadly Over-hyped

Great Film overall

Dreadfully Boring

In a revealing and playful mood, filmmaker Agnes Varda narrates her own filmed autobiography in The Beaches of Agnes. The film begins with Varda, now 82, setting up mirrors on the beach with the sounds of one of her mother's favorite works, Schubert's Unfinished Symphony in the background Though she asserts that "Today, I'm playing a little old lady, talkative and plump," she looks anything like a little old lady. The film re-creates her life with childhood memories that take her back to homes she knew as a child in Brussels and the city of Sete where she made her first film at the age of 26.The film is not a dry documentary, filled with reminiscences of people we never heard of. It is a work of art in itself, a celebration not only of her life, but of all life. Along the way, Varda takes us to Los Angeles (one of her favorite cities in which she lived) where she talks about and shows photos of her former husband Jacques Demy, who she announces died of AIDS in 1990, Jane Birkin, Chris Marker (dressed as a cartoon cat) and even poet, singer Jim Morrison. Varda began as a photographer and we see an example of her photos from a long time ago. While the film documents Varda's films beginning with her first Le Pointe Curé in 1956 to the present day and the first appearances on film of Gerald Depardieu, Phillipe Noiret, and Harrison Ford, she also discusses in detail and shows excerpts from her most popular films including Cléo from 5 to 7, Le Bonheur, Vagabond, The Gleaners and I, and her documentary tributes to her husband.Rather than an egoists attempt to enhance a reputation with big events in which she participated, the film looks at small things like the uniform she had to wear in Vichy France and a scene at an outdoor flea market where the director finds cardboard cutouts of herself and other filmmakers with their works listed on the back. But there is much more. With actors dramatizing important memories from her life, The Beaches of Agnes is filled with the people, including her two grown children, places and events, including her trips to Cuba and China that contributed to her personal growth and made her the lively and vibrant person she is today. She closes the documentary by saying, "I am alive, and I remember." While we are still alive, we will remember her.

"The Beaches of Agnes" is an autobiographical documentary done in a uniquely impressionistic style. The subject is Agnes Varda, the legendary French director who began her career in the 1950s and, who at the age of 80, shows that she is still a master of her art and craft. For not only does Varda provide the voice-over narration for the film, but she conceived and directed the project as well.Varda uses as her focal point the various beaches where she spent a great deal of her time growing up. It is to these places that she has brought a crew of filmmakers to shoot her delivering extended monologues on her life and to restage - often in a cleverly amusing and surrealistic style - memories and events that have remained with her throughout the years. When she has actual photos and file footage from the past, she is quick to use them, but when she doesn't, she turns to present-day re-creations to fill in the gaps. But all is not limited to the beach, for she frequently heads inland to retrace the steps of her life, visiting key locations along the way.She explores her childhood, when she lived much of the time on a houseboat; her teen years, when she was thoroughly ignorant of what a woman could do in the world and of the realities of man/woman relationships; her experiences during the War and the Occupation, when most French citizens "lived day to day;" her years studying art at the Ecole du Louvre; her first taste of freedom and independence when she stole off one night all on her own to Corsica; her time spent as a fisherman; her burgeoning fascination with photography; her marriage to fellow director and film-making inspiration, Jacques Demy; her role as mother and grandmother; her trips to Cuba and Southern California in the 1960s to capture in photos and on film the turbulent nature of that period; her fervent pro-feminist leanings that often found their way into her movies; and her eventual transition to film-making herself to become the only female figurehead of the French New Wave, an otherwise Young Boys' Club that included, in addition to Demy, Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, and various other cinematic masters.It is here that the movie turns to Varda's career as a filmmaker, as the artist herself discusses her inspirations, her key themes and concerns, and the logistical problems of the movie-making process itself. The movie provides us with a generous sampling of clips from not just her own movies but those of Demy as well.As she reflects back on her life, Varda addresses the issues of aging, memory, and personal loss (especially of her beloved Jacques, who died of AIDS in 1990). She views the sea as representative of permanence - and human beings and their foreshortened life spans as symbols of the universe at its most temporal. Through its mixing of the real with the surreal, the literal with the figurative, "The Beaches of Agnes" mirrors the hybrid nature of Varda's photographic and cinematic works themselves.But the movie is often at its most charming when it is content to simply BE, when some seemingly random image, person, event or thought comes along to capture Varda's complete and undivided attention - a testament to her astute powers of observation, to her complete and utter absorption in the moment, and to her ability to make art out of the raw materials of actual life.And isn't that what movie-making is really all about, after all?

Agnès Varda today is an impressive women, whose present self is woven throughout this poetic film autobiography. At eighty (a surprise birthday celebration decorates the end credits) she is spry of body and vigorous of mind, inventive and alive, looking forward as well as back in this poetic film autobiography. She blends living tableaux, installations, old footage, voice-over, interviews. She is ever present, talking, inventing, directing, symbolically (and actually, on camera) walking backward. The result is far too beautiful to call "documentary portrait." Remembering the film, one thinks of Agnès at various ages, always with the same shiny dark cloche of hair (allowed to grow white in some shots) and the same solid, mobile form. One also remembers circus acrobats performing on a beach; a carnivalesque film office set up in the sand. One thinks of Agnès with Demy, and his sweet, sad face; her children and grandchildren, dressed in white and cavorting around her for the camera 'contre jour', into the sun, on the sand with the sea behind them, glorious and handsome and Mediterranean. This is a celebration of cinema and of life.She does not forget to talk about the Nazis and the extermination camps, or her schoolgirl songs celebrating the collaborationist government of Pètain and Vichy. Or her sadness about all the great people she photographed and knew who are gone. Or her anger about the exploitation of women.But Beaches of Agnès is also not without deliberate lacunae. How did the love of her life, her husband, her co-director on his famous Umbrellas of Cherbourg, happen to die of AIDS? Everybody is talking to her, so they tell her what she wants to hear. There's nothing wrong with that, because we want to hear it too. Yet with the poetry and beauty one's left in a bit of a daze, because film fiction and film fact and reenactment and chronology are interwoven so cunningly and rapidly you need a chronology and a stop button, which are not provided. The fluidity of it is quite enchanting. But it doesn't exactly leave you with a precise knowledge of this wonderful, long life that's probably not near its creative end. (After all, we already live in an age of 80-something and 90-something filmmakers. And here is a woman, and women live longer than men.) To hold together such a rich life, Agnès Varda needed a theme, and she feels in everyone there is a landscape, but in her there are beaches; her life has often revolved around them. The eternal theme of woman and water, weave, wave, wife. And if it was difficult to provide unity, that only reflects the richness of the life.Her father was Greek, her mother French; her first name was Arlette; she legally changed it to Agnès at 18. She was born in Belgium, and in 1940 they fled to Sète on the south coast of France (where Kechiche's Secret of the Grain unfolds and she lived her adolescence. After studying photography in Paris and working for the Theatre National Populaire, she came knew everybody, including Godard, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Demy of course. Jean Vilar of the national theater, Philippe Noiret, whom she used in her first film, 'Pointe Courte.' In Hollywood she befriended Jim Morrison of the Doors, and to use Harrison Ford in a movie at a time when he was told he had no future in pictures.She covered the Cuban and Chinese revolutions, fought for abortion and other women's issues, was grouped with Marker and Resnais as part of the Nouvelle Vague, lived in and loved LA and was filming the Black Panthers when Paris was in turmoil in June of '68. (In '67, the Summer of Love, she made 'Uncle Yanco,' about her bohemian painter uncle who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito.) She made such classic films as (her first important work) 'Cleo from 5 to 7',, the Bresson-like 'Vagabond'/'Sans toit ni loi;' 'The Gleaners;' 'One Sings, the Other Doesn't.' 'Vagabond' won the Golden Lion in Venice and made Sandrine Bonaire a star. Varda made films about LA murals ('Murs murs') and hippies ('Lions Love,' with Warhol's Viva), and Jane Birkin, and completed three about Jacque Demy after his death. As she points out, light small digital cameras were important for in the making of 'The Gleaners' (perhaps also for 'Vagabond'?).In 2006, at 78, she was invited to do a video and stills installation, "L'Ile et elle" (the island and her: she likes such punning titles), about the island of Noirmoutier--a step forward in a new career that's reflected in the various 'tableaux vivantes' and installations of this film that evoke her past poetically, express her vision, and simply enchant and avoid forever the boredom of the conventional filmed autobiography. She begins with rich use of mirrors on the beach, moving among them and directing and talking to her typically attractive young film crew. In one remarkable sequence, she has the men who worked in one of her early films reassembled, pushing a large cart through the street at night, with a projector mounted on it showing the. Film.She can be a bit maudlin, as she is throwing down roses in a huge installation of her old much enlarged black and white portraits of Gerard Philippe, Philippe Noiret, and other departed stars of her firmament and French cinema's. And when talking about Jacques Demy, she weeps. But mostly she is joyous, and smiles. The fact the cause of Demy's death, AIDS, was kept secret then and for years after she attributes to the stigma attached to the disease in the Eighties.Varda's eliding of distinctions between real and imaginary, documentary and fiction, present and past can be very confusing: distinctions don't mean enough to her. But though things could be more organized and expository, her confusions and confutation's are still beautiful and fascinating to watch.

Autobiographies can be the worst or the best of things. Either a boring exercise in conceit and self-absorption or a fascinating self-exploration by a person of value.Well, the Agnes of 'Les plages d'Agnès' being Agnès Varda there is no need to worry. She undoubtedly belongs to the second category.It goes without saying that to fully appreciate this wonderful film you have to be a minimum acquainted with Varda's oeuvre. But a minimum is enough, for it does not take long before the lady starts captivating you, not by boasting about all the masterpieces she made, but by creating a new kind of story-telling right before your eyes.One thing I am pretty sure of is that there is no other film, autobiographical or not, that looks like "Les plages d'Agnès".Of course there is no question that Varda's life is rich and worth telling: she worked for and with great artists, she was married to one of the most original French directors ever (Jacques Demy), she covered the fledgling Chinese and Cuban revolutions, fought in favor of feminism when it was not yet fashionable to do so. The real issue for the director was in fact to find HOW to talk about herself. Well after viewing "Les Plages d'Agnès", I can tell her (and I am far from being the only one to think so): "You did it brilliantly, Agnès".Indeed Agnès Varda is not content to go through the motions of the standard autobiographical movie: talking face to the camera or in voice over, interviewing witnesses of her life and illustrating her words with significant clips. She does that of course but she knows how to enrich the material through a lot original finds: the mirrors on the beaches,her walking backwards to show she goes back in time, the circus artists on the beach, recreating her Cine Tamaris production office on a fake beach in Rue Daguerre, her sailing a boat from Sete to Paris as an allegory of the evolution of her career, etc. etc. Agnès Varda never rests on her laurels throughout. Quite the contrary: she creates, invents, tries out new things sequence after sequence. In the film she calls herself 'une petite vieille' (a short old lady) but I suspect she says so out of vanity because she does not look old at all. Actually, she has retained all the freshness, all the spontaneity of the young lady she once was. Don't refrain from seeing this film even if it does not appeal to you in the first place. When the end credits roll you will probably - just like I did - utter with a sigh: "Is it already the end?"