Menschengesichter

Frenchwoman Emilie (Sabine Mamou) struggles to pull her life together in L. A. She left her partner and has to find a place for her and her young son. This is a French film located in America. It's done in a documentary style. It's a slice of her life but it's not really hooking me in. It's interesting but not really.

Sabine Mamou is a writer living with her son in Los Angeles.

When Agnès Varda makes a movie, she has my respectful attention, but this movie, in which Mlle Mamou, usually her editor, plays the role, with Mlle Varda's son, Matthieu Demy as her son, looks to be fairly unengaging. There's a stream of consciousness narration near the beginning, in which words and phrases are jumbled together, but that gradually disappears, until at the end the two of them sit, looking blankly at a mariachi band. Is the point to not to try to ascribe meaning, but accept the world as it is, or is that a sign of growing despair? I cannot tell. Perhaps Mlle Varda wanted to sit on the knife's edge between the two positions. If so, it's an uncomfortable position.

Varda continues to travel with just a camera, content to film with no larger narrative in mind other than to approach things, here motherhood, breakup, loneliness. She's in LA here, I was initially keen for just that aspect; how would she see that place of dreams?

In a previous entry, Daguerrotypes, it was the senile old wife of a Parisian perfume maker that captured her the most, looking achingly lost in the small shop as she sat by the door, not fully there anymore, like time was blowing through her from an open window somewhere. What life here?

It's the same lostness she returns to. A mother alone with her son in LA, after breaking up with the father, wanders and ruminates. What it says about Varda's marriage to Demy is a guess, but it matters I think that she presents on screen a grieving woman alone with her son.

It's Varda's own son actually, the French woman a surrogate for Varda, a way for her to have a body in the stream of images.

We can glean more about the 'real' Varda in other ways, I'm more interested in perceptions and how they give rise to self. It's telling for me here that she gives to herself the role of a typist, typing and retyping pages before a beach, a favorite place for her. Varda could have plainly chosen to portray her as anything, she chose a job where words, expression, have been reduced to a mechanical task without meaning.

In the beginning she ruminates on the meaninglessness of words, how words and images lose meaning, faces look strange, when you're shut out from the life that gives everything its place. Meaning is use linguists would say. It's itself the attitude to find meaning I would add, how you place yourself in things.

It gives an overwhelming sense of melancholy in the end, which is how Varda places herself here, fecund absence, waiting without reproach. Her friend Chris Marker, it reminds of him in spirit, but he also finds bemusement in many small things. She's shut in her own self here, it was probably a time for it. It strikes a simple note. Oh but she's so adept with echo, I've carried it with me for two days now.

This is Varda staring out from that window that time blows through. I'm setting my eyes ahead to a time when she has left this room.

DOCUMENTEUR is a wonderful little French movie shot in Southern California. It tells a small, personal story about a young single mother trying to raise her son and make ends meet in a new, unfamiliar country.

It's very different than most things I've seen in movies but very much like real life. It is very good. It feels like a documentary and was probably shot like one. It was probably shot without a script, focusing on small details and things like that. It has that feel to it. For those reasons I know a lot of people will not like this movie. But for those very same reasons it will appeal to others. Recommend.

'Documenteur' is an interesting essay, but not one of the milestones in the filmography of Agnes Varda. The film follows a French woman, just out of a relationship, looking for housing and than living for a while in a non-proviledged neighborhood of Los Angeles. It's an interesting combination - fiction inspired from the biography of the director who at that point in her life was separated, the lead role is played by Sabine Mamou, her only film as an actress, while the kid is Mathieu Demy, Agnes Varda's son (and formidable acting as a kid - he will become later a professional actor). Much of the rest is film in the streets with non-professional actors, with some nude and sex scenes interleaved to make us feel the loneliness of the character. A verbose text translates to us in parallel her feelings. The combination is interesting, but there is no real story here, and the film is too short, and its ending to abrupt to make complete sense. My overall feeling was to have watched a filmed essay, an experimental movie, but not really a full feature film.