Agnes Varda: Compassion & Commentary on Film
Agnes Varda is arguably the most important director to come out of the French New Wave even if her name is often overshadowed by Godard, Truffaut, or even her own husband, Jacques Demy. She brought documentary experimentalism, social commentary, and compassionate care for her characters. Commonly referred to as the mother of the New Wave, Varda’s achievements should not be swept under the rug especially, when you consider that in her 90 years of life, she never stopped producing compelling work; something many of her peers cannot say.
Varda was born in 1928 to Greek immigrants. Initially, she had little interest in film as she studied art history and worked as a photographer for ten years. Her first film, La Pointe Courte (1954) was a drama about a failing marriage in a French fishing village. The critics at the respected French film magazine, Le Cahiers du Cinema loved it and many now consider this film to be the first of the new wave. After her debut, she continued to work on experimental shorts and documentaries for the French government, but her breakthrough would come in 1962 with her film Cleo from 5 to 7. The film focuses on a young vain singer who awaits the results of her medical tests. It paved the way for feminist commentary in film while remaining a stylish and fun highpoint in French cinema.
After that, Varda went into overdrive. She made two of the most important short documentaries in history with Black Panthers and Salut Les Cubains, an indepth look at the Cuban revolution. Throughout the 70s and 80s, she made boundary pushing feminist narrative pieces like One Sings, the Other Doesn’t and Vagabond. One was a simplistic feminist musical about two female friends and the other focuses on the final days of a young homeless woman’s life. Varda found a way to bring the experimental and sensitive parts of the new wave and merge them into a socially conscious cinema that never hit you over the head with doctrine or propaganda. Above all, Varda’s most radical political stance was that every person merits at least one scene in a movie.
Later in her life, Agnes Varda began focusing less and less on fictional characters and more and more on the people in her life — those she had met — and herself. When her husband and partner died in 1988, she made a documentary celebrating his life and career called The World of Jacques Demy and a couple of years later, she made The Gleaners and I, a documentary which some believe to be her crowning achievement. She continued working until she died and at the age of 89, Varda received an Oscar nomination for her documentary Faces Places. When many of her contemporaries like Truffaut, Resnais, and Rohmer were long dead, Varda continued to make nuanced and inventive cinema, begging the question: what's the use of having a father of New Wave when the mother is so effective, sympathetic, and timeless.
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t perfectly emulates this compassion and inventiveness that is synonymous with Varda’s work. The film tells the story of two women, Pauline and Suzanne. The two women become close when Suzanne, who by 21 has two children, needs to get an abortion and Pauline helps pay for it. A subsequent tragedy bonds the two women for life and though they are separated throughout most of the film, their bond remains strong as their love story is told through the postcards they continue to write to each other. For another director, these two women would represent the diverging paths of womanhood with each being the opposite of the other. Varda is much more nuanced than that. As the title suggests the only obvious archetypal difference between the two women is that one sings and the other doesn’t.
This is not the tale of traditional vs. revolutionary women or smart vs stupid. These women surprise even themselves with how much they subvert their own expectations. Pauline who appears to have a more nomadic hippie lifestyle gets married in a traditional ceremony while Suzanne who at the beginning seemed to adhere to popular convention gets married in a small civil ceremony with just her children and no white dress. These women contradict each other at every turn. These are not cinematic archetypes, they’re women. There’s no need for each of them to follow formulaic paths.
For Varda, there is no one way to be a woman. Even though she emphasizes the importance of motherhood for these women, Varda accepts that this is not an inherent step every woman has to take or that every woman has to do it the same way. The film, in fact, centers most of the major events around abortions. Pauline and Suzanne become close when Pauline helps pay for her abortion; Pauline later meets her husband when she goes to Amsterdam to get an abortion, and the women reunite for the first time at an abortion rally. Choice above all is the important component to Varda’s idea of liberation. Suzanne and Pauline never get angry at each other for making reactionary or reckless decisions, they are always understanding because their connection is so strong. The men in their life come and go but their relationship is eternal.
Varda ends by emphasizing this female lineage. The final scene shows Pauline and Suzanne reuniting for the first time in years. They drink, eat, and have fun as the camera pans around the ethereal scene. Varda stops at Suzanne’s daughter, who is played by Agnes’ own daughter, Rosalie Varda. Varda narrates and details her hopes that the next generation of women will struggle less and find happiness sooner. Just as Varda was a mother to this film movement, she hoped to guide and not direct a new generation of women to find their way. Driven by compassion, Agnes Varda showed the world there was no rulebook for being a woman.
