Dir: Agnes Varda, France, 345mins
Cast: Silvia Monfort, Philippe Noiret, Claire Drouot
Review by Richard Dilks
The Gleaners & I
This documentary's casual handheld aesthetic is a world away from this set's other films. Bringing her talent for documentary to full form, Varda turns the flexibility of the digital camera into a moving, ingenious and humble film. Gleaning is the collecting of produce after the harvest; Varda's pickings here are the rich fruits of her imagination and honesty. She starts with gleaning's rural origins before quickly mixing in urban gleaning – befriending those who live off the leftovers of France 's food markets or, things its consumers have stopped consuming. We meet a lawyer expert in the field (pun intended), people struggling with alcoholism and poverty, artists, owners, workers. The film sticks with the individual, resisting the temptation to sweep to political or policy conclusions. You feel she must have spent many hours talking to and filming her subjects to be intimate enough with them. This is confirmed by the ‘Two Years Later' follow-up documentary on this disc. Here Varda explains the on-rush of emotion and communication she received after ‘The Gleaners' re-encounters some of its characters and includes clips cut from ‘The Gleaners & I'. The disc also has two featurettes, one on Varda's cats (a motif of all her fictional films); one on the paintings seen in the main film.
Le Bonheur
Any film centred on the free love of the 1960s can seem dated. It's this film's part-subversion of that idea, its only half-belief that being faithful to one person is damaging, that saves it from the curio-only level of ‘Jules et Jim'. But it also incarcerates the film in uncertainty. Hyper-coloured and visually immaculate, ‘Le Bonheur' depicts the lives of Francois (Jean-Claude Drouot), his wife Claire (Therese; Drouout's wife in real life) and their children (Olivier and Sandrine Drouot, their children). At first, all seems to be small-scale domesticated bliss, with the faint feeling of being in a very long advert for something. When Francois' eye starts to stray, it's easy to anticipate the revelations that will follow. But they don't. That is the film's originality, but also its tedium. The tragic twist neither generates the result you would expect nor much of interest or excitement. The film's half-belief in sexual freedom is its salvation, damnation and boredom all in one. The twist staves off mounting nausea at the welter of ‘happiness' on show – the film's
characters spend a lot of time saying how happy they are – but doesn't offer anything other than a pricked balloon. There are six documentaries on the disc. Only one of these is of interest, showing intriguing glimpses of Varda's on-set working methods, with husband (Jacques Demy) lingering in the background.
Cleo de 5 a 7
This is a barbed and innovative piece of cinema. Once you've seen it, you can feel its mark on our cine-sensibilities now in films such as ‘Amelie', ‘Before Sunset' and ‘Delicatessen'. Although the opening Tarot reading of Cleo's future is in luscious colour, the body of the film is in stark, clear black and white, very fresh in this presentation. The division is between possibilities and reality. Cleo (Corinne Marchand) bounds between the two as she confronts physical (cancer) and emotional malaise in her privileged but precarious skitter around Paris . Showing another facet to her talent for observation, Varda builds on a technique prominent in La Pointe Courte, of having the camera shift off the protagonists to include passers-by conversations, foregrounding the background. So the city and citizens become a part of this slice of the troubled pop star's day (which is actually from 5pm to 6.30pm ).
Part city symphony, part fictional biopic (one can imagine the real version- as the discussion with Madonna in one of the bonus features fleshes out) and part satirical fantasy, ‘Cleo' is perhaps too moored in its time to be as original as ‘Breathless', but it is fascinating to watch. A short film contained within it – the subject of another bonus feature on the disc – is revealing about Varda's presentation of the choices her characters make, with two alternative resolutions depending on which lens they are seen through.
La Pointe Courte
Varda's first film exudes technical bravura. The camera's freedom is not that of sloppiness; it is an agile, elegant dancer, whirling and waltzing around this Mediterranean fishing port. The mise en scene's vitality has long out-lived the dynamism of the central couple's relationship, which feels heavily dated. Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret play that familiar pair: he a hayseed; she a city sophisticate, negotiating whether they can hack small town life. The film's depiction of that small town life has much more zest, done to a depth that betrays Varda's natural talent for documenting societies and the individuals they are made of.
The cinematography's constant play with light and shadow is tangibly clear in this crisp transfer, even if the emotional shades of some scenes are more moving than others. Many early Varda hallmarks are here, as cats twine around this village of Varda 's imagination, at its most resonant when being itself. The extra is a remarkable short by Varda, ‘Du cote de la cote', a quasi-spoof on a travel promo of the Cote d'Azur with lacings of wit and a seductiveness that would later bloom in ‘Cleo de 5 a 7'.
Box set
These films are well presented, the clarity of ‘La Pointe Courte' and suffused colour of ‘Le Bonheur' being particularly enjoyable. Their sound quality is merely good, less enveloping. All the discs carry extras, albeit one or two fewer in the cases of ‘Cleo' and ‘Le Bonheur' than the Criterion Collection set.
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