Cinematically Speaking: The Woman Who Beat the Boys of the French New Wave to the Punch

Dwight Garner

The French filmmakerAgnes Varda, who died in 2019 at the age of 90, was so revered that her final decade was one long victory lap of honorary awards, retrospectives and interviews. Even she grew tired of hearing about herself. “No. No! It’s enough! I’m not a religion. I’m still alive,” she said onstage, after a particularly fulsome introduction.

Varda despised being a living legend, except for when she loved it, which was more often. Who would not feel similarly? The sheer length of her career accounted for some of the awe. Her movies included a classic of the French New Wave, “Cléo From 5 to 7” (1962), and “Vagabond” (1985), her masterpiece, which flashes back over the life of a young woman, a hitchhiking outsider, who is found dead in a ditch at the movie’s start.

Her justly lionized documentary, “The Gleaners and I” (2000), was about France’s rural poor and foragers of many varieties. Varda narrated and appeared in that indelible movie, the way Michael Moore did in “Roger and Me.” With her bobbed hair, her diminutive stature (Varda was barely five feet tall), her mischievous manner and her noncondescending way of interacting with her subjects — one all interviewers should study — she made an outsize impression. More than a few people left the theater half in love with her.

The film critic Carrie Rickey, in her compact new biography, “A Complicated Passion,” delivers perceptive readings of Varda’s movies, and she charts how Varda had to scramble, in a male-dominated film world, to get them made. “Good things, when short, are twice as good,” Tom Stoppard said. He was not talking about Varda. But he might have been talking about this biography. Rickey’s crisp and swiftly moving book has 224 pages of text. More biographies should be this size.

Away from the camera, Varda led a busy and bohemian life. She made her own clothes; she slept with both women and men; there was always a cigarette dangling from her mouth. She did not suffer fools.

With her “Picasso eyes and monkish haircut,” in Rickey’s words, she resembled a character from Anais Nin’s diaries, and indeed she knew Nin and Henry Miller well. The house Varda bought in 1951 in the then scruffy 14th arrondissement consisted of two properties she consolidated. One side was for work, the other for living. It was a countercultural salon, and it tended to be full of engaging others. She lived there until her death, and it was always, as her gallerist put it, “a work in progress.”

Varda seemed to know everyone. She was close to Jim Morrison, for example, a former film student and the frontman for the Doors, whom she’d met in Los Angeles. When he died of a drug overdose in Paris, in 1971, she was among the first to arrive at his apartment. She used her connections to keep his death out of newspapers until there had been time for a dignified burial.

Because Varda was so prolific — she made more than 40 feature films and shorts — Rickey’s narrative threatens at times to turn into an annotated filmography. But I devoured “A Complicated Passion” happily and so, I suspect, will you. It sent me rushing to the Criterion Channel to rewatch Varda’s movies. The best parts of this book are the early to middle chapters, as they are in most biographies. We witness how Varda became Varda.

She was born in Belgium, the third of five children. None of the others had an artistic bent. The family fled Belgium in front of the Nazi invasion, escaping by car and then boat. They moved to Paris before it was liberated in 1944, when she was 16.

Her father patented a type of industrial crane and became wealthy. He and Varda never saw eye to eye; each disappointed the other. Her mother, though, nurtured her creativity. When Agnes expressed an interest in photography, her mother pawned a piece of jewelry to buy her a top-of-the-line Rolleiflex.

Thanks to the parents of a childhood friend, Varda got a job as a photographer for an important independent Paris theater company. She made her first film, “La Pointe Court,” in 1955. A forerunner of the French New Wave, it is about a couple in turmoil who visit a small fishing village.

Her friend and sometimes lover Alain Resnais, who would direct “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” a few years later, lent her equipment and helped her edit “La Pointe Court.” The film never got a proper release, but screenings became catnip for France’s artists and intellectuals. Not everyone saw it, in other words, but the right people did.

Some of the highlights of Rickey’s book depict Varda’s fond but rivalrous relationships with the filmmakers she called the “Cahiers boys,” after the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. They included Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. It took the film world decades to realize that Varda had beaten them to the punch, in terms of making the kind of fresh, spirited low-budget movies that defined the French New Wave.

Varda married the director Jacques Demy in 1962; this book’s title comes from Varda’s description of their time together. He released his best-known movie, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” in 1964. She and Demy had a son. (Varda had a daughter from a previous relationship.) In 1979, he left her to live with another man, yet Varda and Demy remained close. After he died from AIDS, she made a film about him and his work.

Varda’s own style was to have no overt style. Her films were lightly scripted when they were scripted at all. She counted on serendipitous accidents and knew how to take advantage of them. She hired dozens upon dozens of women to work with her on movies, and many of them went on to have significant careers of their own.

She was determined to get nuanced women, not role models, onto the screen. “Do you know any intelligent women?” she asked in a 1977 interview with The Times. “They exist, don’t they? Why aren’t they ever in films?”