Watch The Beaches of Agnès For Free

the audience applauded

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

So I finally arrive for the last leg of my journey with Varda in this self portrait. I will rest here for the time being with the beautiful introspection of it; not because she has stopped working, she hasn't, but this permits an appreciation of everything she strives to live for. For newcomers it will be a good place to start knowing her and they can deepen each chapter by going back to her earlier travels.Introspection is the wrong word actually. Varda doesn't keep things internalized, I don't get the sense of anything hidden or dimly seen. For her it is all readily available, it is all externalized and offered up to us like we are guests in her house on an afternoon and she just waves us in smiling. I get the sense of a woman who has traveled far and seen amazing things and can't wait to share it all with a giddy, sometimes shy, excitement.This isn't the first time she is reflecting on herself of course, many of her works are self portraits on the side or inspired by real life. We learn for example that Daguerrotypes she filmed around her neighborhood because she was pregnant at the time and had to stay at home. But how does she present herself here, what images of her? Varda as grandmotherly raconteur, as young girl overcoming her shyness with men, as spirited woman who protested injustice, as wife and soulmate and explorer.As for stories, she has been all over and has plenty. Traveled to China and Cuba in her twenties and came back with images of revolution. Knew Godard and speaks about her filmmaking start via Resnais. She was in Oakland in '68 to film the Panthers. Knew Jim Morrison. Partied with Warhol's circle in LA. Protested feminism with Delphine Seyrig in the streets. Marker is in the film, speaking from behind an image. These and more.Saying that she shares it all in the open isn't the whole truth either; truth is knowing how to sculpt it after all. You might appreciate how eloquently she speaks about discovering sex in Corsica one summer by not speaking about it. How gracefully she speaks about her marriage, sketching only the air around unhappiness (as all marriages know) by a small gesture; yes, she was the woman in Documenteur. She is one of those beautiful souls who know how to move towards things, how to move back, how to see and from what distance. The most lasting impression however is of a woman who glides through lives she recalls and summons to her in the beach of memory, and this is Varda herself in the actual film moving through images, photos of childhood, mirrors, a visit to her childhood home yields an impromptu discussion about model trains, clips from old films, enactments, narrations about these. But moves with an unfettered soul. She opens the film with "I'm playing the role of a little old lady, telling her life story". Be like her, play the role of someone who happens to be the person you have come to be; no more is necessary.For near the end she reserves a small gem that carries the wisdom of entire lives, there's more to this one line than in entire careers. Prior to it, we have seen a woman who has known heartbreak enough, pacing alone in the house of images (the place with strips of film hanging from walls). Now her family, kids and grandkids, are dancing nearby. Watching them she muses that they're her happiness, she doesn't know if she knows them or understands them, she just goes towards them. Something to meditate upon.

Agnès Varda presented us in this autobiographical movie with her memories of a life devoted to the cinema and not only. She does that in powerful and beautiful images supported by a brilliant, witty and sensitive commentary. In this movie we can see references to several of some of the best Varda's films such as La Pointe Courte, Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Bonheur, with images, and to some of the greatest and more important figures of French cinema such as her husband Jacques Demy to begin with and also Godard, Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin and others. The cut is very intelligent and effective in visual terms combining the present and the past sometimes in simultaneous images with a special effect here and there. A masterpiece indeed.

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?"