Absolute Powers: My dinner with Agnès

You learn a lot about people when something bad happens to them.  

A few nights ago, I invited some friends to a small dinner with French filmmaker Agnès Varda at the wonderful Hollywood wine bar Lou, which attracts everyone from cash-strapped grad students and flush retirees to Rosario Dawson and noir novelist James Ellroy. It was a fine, warm L.A. evening, and everything seemed to be perfect—until Varda arrived, looking stricken beneath her trademark Dutch-boy haircut. She’d just discovered that at her previous stop, someone had walked off with her shoulder bag, which contained her money, address book, camera, and worst of all, a video camera filled with irreplaceable footage. Clearly shaken, she said simply, “My life is in that bag.” 

She meant it. Varda belongs to that generation of French directors for whom cinema is almost a religious idea. She’s spent her life collecting images—it’s her way of understanding the world.

Just the night before she’d been at the L.A. premiere of The Beaches of Agnès, a lovely autobiographical film that sifts through the diverse elements of her life, from her Brussels birth in 1928, through the self-inventing moment when she changed her name from Arlette to Agnès, to her present-day status as an octogenarian grandmother and cinematic icon. Though the film tackles such serious themes as art, memory, and love, she herself never becomes self-serious—at one point, she even dresses up as a potato! While one could easily say that she’s the most distinguished living woman filmmaker, that might be read as faint praise. She’s one of the most distinguished living filmmakers, period, and her work is only now getting its due.

Varda’s career began with an astonishing act of audacity when she was 26. Although she knew virtually nothing about filmmaking (she’d studied still photography), she simply decided to make a movie about the port town of Sète, where she grew up. Her boldness paid off. With its blend of documentary realism and high style, La Pointe-Court (1954) proved to be the earliest ripple of what became the New Wave. In the half century that followed, Varda continued to make riveting, highly original works, including two extraordinary films focusing on women: the sleek Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961), a tale of self-realization about a pop singer (Corinne Marchand) waiting to hear whether she has cancer, and Vagabond (1985), the fiercely beautiful story of a drifter (a dazzling young Sandrine Bonnaire) who burns too hot for our cool world. (All three are available on Criterion’s splendid boxed DVD set, 4 by Agnès Varda.) There were other superb films, too, not least my personal favorite, The Gleaners and I, a 2000 documentary (also on DVD) that begins by talking to poor rural scavengers and then, in a philosophic turn that’s quintessentially French, becomes a profound personal essay into what it means to salvage things the world doesn’t want. 

When Varda got back from reporting the crime at the Hollywood police station, I could tell she was still depressed at the loss of her valuables—especially all those images—but she refused to let it spoil her evening. Before I knew it, she was doing exactly what The Beaches of Agnès makes you think she’d do: She was learning about the people around her. She talked about food with the wine bar’s owner, Lou Amdur, and got into a cat-fancier’s discussion of their respective felines with New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis. My wife, Sandi Tan, had just sold her first novel, The Black Isle, and Varda wanted to know what it was all about. Not that she couldn’t be argumentative or venture strong opinions. At one point, we were discussing a local newspaper’s piece on a filmmaker whose interviews are as grandiose as his films are artistically dinky. “I don’t like immodesty,” she said with crushing equanimity, as if enunciating a metaphysical truth.

Normally, I wouldn’t believe such words from any director, let alone one busy promoting a film about her own life. But in her case, I made an exception. Varda has had a long, tricky, sometimes painful journey, yet what’s striking about this famously diminutive woman is that she seems so vibrant and youthful. It’s hard not to think that she’s been kept young by her by unflagging curiosity about the world outside herself.

Walking her to back to her car at the end of the evening, I found myself thinking, I hope I’m that alive when I’m 81.