Godmotherly Love

It was chance and motherhood that led Varda to make Daguerréotypes, her first feature-length documentary. Having toddler Mathieu at home, she sought a project that would allow her to stay close to him, and chose to feature the businesses near her house and the people who ran them. As she explains while pulling a cable out of her mailbox and walking along rue Daguerre, where she lived her whole adult life, in 2008’s The Beaches of Agnès, she used her own electricity run through that very cable to power the filming. Since the cable—which, she says, someone suggested was an umbilical cord she didn’t want to cut—was ninety meters long, she could film only the businesses closest to her, the ones owned and frequented by her nearest neighbors.

In Daguerréotypes, Varda intercuts shots of the shopkeepers performing their work with the magic of Mystag, whose show they all attend together, whimsically creating a link between Mystag’s awe-inspiring tricks and the quieter magic of providing one’s neighbors with nourishment and objects for their daily lives. While Mystag places lit torches in his mouth and blows rings of fire into the air, the baker arranges burning coals in his oven. While Mystag transforms the ashes from a burned piece of paper into seven bills, the baker rolls dough into cylinders that the coals turn into golden baguettes, sold to customers by his wife. The dough, like Mystag’s ashes, becomes the bills that sustain the baker’s family.

The documentary radiates with love stories. When asked about her romance, the baker’s wife, standing before the oven, remembers how, as a young girl, she would impatiently wait for Wednesdays, when her future husband would deliver the bread. It’s hard not to imagine that some of that history goes into their bread, adding something to its flavor. As the seamstress cuts fabric, she recalls meeting her own husband, the tailor, at a dance hall. He picks up the story, thimble and needle in hand, remembering how he left his date behind in order to dance with the woman with whom he now spends his days crafting clothes that, viewers can imagine, feature in the couple’s customers’ own romances. The relationship of another pair, Marcelle and Léonce Debrossian, unfolds slowly throughout the film. They own the haberdashery and perfume store where Rosalie buys jasmine water in the opening scene. Léonce tells us they’ve been together for fifty years. As he recalls how they met, Marcelle paces and looks out their display window, barely glancing at the client who comes in to buy three buttons. She is a lot more interested in a mother and daughter who come seeking to buy some makeup, however. As they look at lipstick shades, Marcelle sneaks behind them. The camera tilts down, and we see her hand feeling the soft texture of the girl’s white coat, seeming to revel in the sensation, much as my five-year-old does with my blankets when he wakes me up in the morning. The mother and daughter are momentarily taken aback by this breach of etiquette but proceed as if nothing has happened, while we, the audience, come to realize that Léonce looks after not only his business every day but also his wife of half a century, whose mind seems to be lost in some gentle struggle with aging. Varda unravels their story gradually, over the course of the film, through small, poignant gestures that make their love resonant for viewers, so that it lingers long after the movie is over.

The filmmaker brings the same gentle, playful spirit to her scrutiny of her own life. In The Beaches of Agnès, a documentary in which she explores her past and memory, she confesses that she feels no nostalgia for her childhood but does like to look at photographs from that time. In one photo, she wears a striped bathing suit, and in another, a large white bow. As if the Lilac Fairy had waved her wand, we cut to footage of two little girls dressed as she once was, playing among artificial flowers. Varda is by their side but tells us, “I don’t know what it means to recreate a scene like this. Do we relive the moment? For me, it’s cinema. It’s a game.”

Varda’s use of her films to ruminate on her life and career can result in some magnificently outlandish moments. In the 1969 fiction film Lions Love (. . .  and Lies), made in California, where Varda, Demy, and Rosalie were living for a time, the New York–based experimental filmmaker Shirley Clarke plays herself, in the midst of negotiations with a Hollywood studio to make a feature. In the story, Clarke becomes increasingly frustrated with the studio’s refusal to grant her creative control and decides to overdose on sleeping pills. After she takes the first pill, she stares into the camera and says, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do it, Agnès.” She explains, “I certainly wouldn’t kill myself over not being able to make any goddamn movie.” The one thing she cares about, she says, is her daughter, Wendy. She walks off camera, and we hear her and Varda discussing the scene. Then Varda appears in Clarke’s shirt and takes the pills, while Clarke reminds her that her advice was always for Varda to play herself, because this, after all, is her story.

In this scene, we see two women filmmakers resist the studio system together and process what it means to work outside it. For me, however, it’s the mention of Wendy, the daughter Clarke loves, that generates the exchange’s greatest emotional heft. Varda’s self-exploration is often linked to the attachment we feel to those dearest to us—in her case, her husband and children. In The Gleaners and I (2000), she films her aging hands and her white hair, gently moving the camera in extreme close-up into what becomes an abstract meditation on the passage of time. In the film’s sequel, made two years later, she shares that, while interviewing her, writer Philippe Piazzo had mentioned that the close-ups of her hands and hair reminded him of the shots she’d captured of Demy in Jacquot de Nantes (1991).