Varda showed up late for the dinner, hurrying into the restaurant in a state of agitation. While at a Starbucks, her bag had been stolen — wallet, passport, tout. Her greatest concern was the digital video camera that had the images she’d shot earlier that day of her friend Sharon Stone. Dazed that Stone and Varda occupied the same corner of the universe, I got it together and took her to the police station, where she filled out a report and murmured doubts about the young desk officer.
We returned to the restaurant for our dinner, the first of many encounters that we had over the next decade, sometimes for a leisurely meal or at a festival where invariably she was being honored. The last time I saw her was in May at her house on the Left Bank in Paris, an area that became part of her identity. Varda was routinely called the mother or grandmother or godmother of the French New Wave, and often grouped with its Left Bank flank, alongside her friends Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. She wasn’t always comfortable with the maternal moniker though she later embraced it — and why not? She had shown the way.
A longtime feminist, she was acutely sensitive to oppression and many of her movies center on women. In a 1975 interview with a French magazine, she said she didn’t have any more problems than her male cohort; making movies is difficult for everyone. At the same time, she was aware of her standing as the lone female director in the New Wave and how her presence could be used — as she put it — as an “alibi assuaging the consciences of the men.” But there were also rules. “As long as I was ‘little Varda,’ ‘little Agnès,’ the exception,” and she didn’t get in anyone’s way, she said, she was “helped out, supported and appreciated by my colleagues and companions.”
Varda was in her mid-20s when she shot “La Pointe Courte” in 1954 and a photographer for the Theatre National Populaire in Paris. It was some years before she made her second feature, “Cléo From 5 to 7” (1962). In between those two movies, she made short films, had her first child (a daughter), met her husband, the director Jacques Demy (a son followed much later), and traveled to China. “Cléo” was a great success, and she continued to make excitingly adventurous, insistently political work. Among the most unsettling is “Le Bonheur” (1965), a shocking, pitiless evisceration of the romantic vision of heterosexual marriage in which women are fundamentally disposable and replaceable.
“Le Bonheur” was criticized, including by those who wanted Varda to wag her finger at patriarchy and female oppression, doing the audience’s work for it. But hers is not a cinema of the obvious. One sustaining pleasure of her films is that they don’t neatly fit into boxes, including feminist ones, even while being unmistakably feminist. She wasn’t creating ideals or role models, but specific women in specific places (villages, streets, beaches) who are navigating a world in which the very definitions of women, of the feminine and of femininity are in upheaval. She was after the contradictions, a word that appears in many of her interviews, between clichés and “the images of lived life.”
This wasn’t necessarily what the industry was interested in, and sometimes Varda directed short movies “to keep alive in my own research” as she once put it. The latter-life acclaim and honors were overdue and welcome — she clearly enjoyed being feted — but she didn’t always have institutional and critical support. In the early 1980s, she spoke about being omitted from history books and from special issues of Cahiers du Cinéma dedicated to French cinema. “I was just plain forgotten,” she said. She kept going even if, as she admitted in 1986, with each film she had “to fight like a tiger.”
That year, one of her most critically and commercially successful films, “Vagabond,” about a dangerously unsettled woman, was released in the United States. I distinctly remember being freaked out by “Vagabond,” which opens on the corpse of Mona (a blazing Sandrine Bonnaire), a drifter who freezes to death in a country ditch. Raw, opaque yet also deeply moving, the film tracks her as she wanders from place to place, person to person, alone and finally unknowable. She’s a startlingly uncommon cinematic creation, partly because she is a woman who says no, including to other people.
Varda said she didn’t know why Mona repeatedly said no, a refusal that ends in death. I see “Vagabond,” in part, as a tough, unsentimental exploration about the limits of radical independence for women, which is perhaps what gives it the autobiographical aspect that runs through her movies. Varda’s life and work are filled with contrasts between interiority and exteriority, individuals and their worlds, which makes her house on Rue Daguerre, with its pink facade and striped doors, feel like another auteurist creation.
For the past few years, my friend Joan Dupont and I would have an annual lunch with Varda at her home, eating and talking while periodically visited by one of her cats. She was predictably funny and warm and brilliant, but also sharp and strong and willful. During our lunch last year, Varda said she was tired. But she was as voluble as ever and filled with plans. She reminisced about her mother, who loved art, and her father, who didn’t, and spoke about growing old. “Never complain, never explain,” she said. She asked me about Ava DuVernay. The next week, Varda was off to the Cannes Film Festival, where she presented a restoration of her 1977 film “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t.”
At Cannes, she joined DuVernay and Cate Blanchett on the festival’s red carpet, this time to protest gender inequality at the festival. It was gratifying and deeply moving to see her among all these other women, though I wondered how many understood what Varda — through her example, her will and her art — had done to pave the way for them. In very concrete ways, in film after film, she helped show women that there was a place for them in movies beyond that of the inevitably beautiful, inevitably young star.
At the end of “The Beaches of Agnès,” Varda asks, “What is cinema?” repeating André Bazin’s essential question. She is standing in one of the witty structures — a house of cinema — that she had fabricated for her multimedia installations. Cinema is light, images, dark, color, she says, over shots of the edifice with its metal frame and walls of film strips. Soon, she is inside. “In here, it feels like I live in cinema, cinema is my home,” she says. “I think I’ve always lived in it.” In the last shot, Varda is looking directly at the camera — at us — framed in an open door that feels like an invitation.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.