Directing: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B-

My take on Varda by Agnès will be unfair. It will also be surprising, in light of how much I enjoyed the 2017 documentary Faces Places, which was largely about the same woman—or, half of it was, anyway. It’s just that Faces Places was about just one of Agnès Varda’s many artistic exploits, and it happened to be one of her far more interesting ones. Varda by Agnès is much more a retrospective of her entire life’s work, with a heavy focus on her work as a film director, and for me at least, it just wasn’t anywhere near as compelling.

Not that it matters to the, say, two and a half people who might bother reading this review. How many of you even know who Agnès Varda is? or was—in contrast to Faces Places, Varda by Agnès has been released after her death nearly a year ago, in late March 2019. I didn’t even realize that until coming home from the movie today, at which I did marvel at her mental acuity at such an age, still creating art, which she evidently did to the very end. She clearly took great joy in her work, and had a stunning vitality for her age. We should all be so lucky to be like Agnès.

And, to be fair, if you are familiar with Agnès Varda, and you have interest in the broad spectrum of her work, you will no doubt find Varda by Agnès worth your time. And even I found some of this movie’s presentation interesting: it edits together footage from an apparent speaking tour, in which Varda sits on a stage, refers to notes, and regales live theater audiences with observations about the whole of her career. Much of it is then intercut with the works to which she is referring, and this does mean there is a fair amount of crossover using footage already seen in Faces Places. In fact, once this film reached that point in her career, for a moment I wondered if it was the same movie.

Nope. I would recommend you check out that other film, actually. It’s available for rent on iTunes and it’s better than this movie, the place at which you could watch it now, I could not tell you. It played as a film at the SIFF Film Center at Seattle Center this weekend only, and was apparently first a two-part TV miniseries. The theater showings, locally at least, are now all done. I only went to see it because it has a stunningly high score of 85 on MetaCritic. A lesson I still need to learn, apparently: those scores do not always reflect your personal tastes.

I’m sad to say that Varda by Agnès literally put me to sleep. I mean, I did not sleep through the whole movie; I did see most of it. But I kept nodding off, and relentlessly so, largely because of the strangely soothing sound of Varda’s “sweet old lady” voice. And I don’t speak French, so if my eyelids droop at all and I can no longer see the subtitles, it just becomes a very pleasant sort of white noise.

I could never say with any authority that it would have the very same effect on any other viewer, of course. This woman was clearly overflowing with talent. Conversely, she was not always without pretension—a bit of an irony, given her reference to some others in this film as being “not pretentious.” Many clips of her films are shown here, a lot of them just presenting nude subjects in “artistic” poses. It smacked of the kind of “art film” sensibility often spoofed by sketch comedy.

To be fair, it’s entirely possible I could feel completely differently were I to watch Agnès by Varda at another time, with a different mindset. This is that kind of movie. There are some compelling stylistic choices, with Varda commenting on the blending of staged action with documentary filmmaking—something she and JR did in Faces Places, and was one of my few least favorite things about that film—at the very same time she’s doing the same thing here. In one scene, she talks about shooting tracking shots, while riding the rig directors use to shoot tracking shots,, and the shot itself is a tracking shot. In another moment, she speaks to breaking the fourth wall, and in so doing, she breaks the fourth wall.

And I am usually super into this sort of meta commentary, particularly on filmmaking. But, for whatever reason, about 80% of this movie just plain bored me. Perhaps it would have been a different story had I even known who Agnès Varda was before February 2018, and I had been following her stunningly long, sixty-year career. Sometimes you just need a hell of a lot more historical context for something to work.

*Turns out Agnès herself is more captivating than her work.*

Overall: B-