There are also the less famous: neighbors, friends, and the sons of neighbors and friends, part of her creative family. We revisit two young boys that she filmed who are now old men. Roger Ebert considered this work not so much a biography, but a “treasured memories of friends” and a poem to a life well-lived.
Ebert suggests seeing Cleo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, Les Creatures, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Kung Fu Master, Daguerreotypes, Jacquot or The Gleaners and I. Her 1962 Cleo is about a French singer who believes she has cancer and is waiting for the results of her biopsy and her thoughts and the people she meets during her wait as she walks the streets of Paris. Some of these movies are about social issues. Vagabond is a dark 1985 movie about the final weeks of a young homeless woman via flashbacks. The 1977 One Sings, the Other Doesn’t depicts two women and their intertwining lives during the women’s movement in France. The Gleaners and I is a 2000 movie about people in France who go over the already harvested fields for leftover produce (turnips and potatoes), a topic Varda would return to two years later. In this respect as well as others, Varda was ahead of her time. Now we'd call it recycling and conservation. More personal is the memoir she filmed of her husband, finishing Jacquot only days before his death.
In this film, The Beaches of Agnés, Varda not only offers up her memories and her past accomplishments, but subtle suggestions about how to live life, suggesting that one can be a mother, a wife, a feminist, and a friend and still create. Perhaps this movie will stand as an inspiration to women and men of all ages who feel their dreams are limited because Varda even today doesn’t see being a woman or even being 80 as a limitation and she has the Cesar to prove it now.
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