Jane B. ... wie Birkin

Here is a strange Felliniesque documentary about Jane Birkin. Varda takes Birkin apart, gets her to confess and open up, makes up some facts, puts her in roles she does not like (she does not want to play Jane, the wife of Tarzan) and offers her to pick roles she would love (Joan of Arc, Mowgli) and a chance to play against actors who she admires. It is a wild avant garde ride, full of humor, beautiful visuals and quirky moments. Not all of the scenes are as interesting and it does sometimes feel like it is not going anywhere but it is a ride well worth taking and it does show well what a daring and challenging artist Varda has always been.

I wish so many more women get this kind of fantastic, marvelous but also gentle and kind experimentation about themselves and their complexities that Agnes Varda gave Jane Birkin. The film is a mix of interviews (but I hesitate to call them interviews, since they aren't the conventional, still, serious kind that the word conjures) and different sketches inspired from a painting, a sentence uttered, a rough script drafted by Jane, and many other things that show the different sides and aspirations of a woman and an actress. Unlike other directors though, Agnes never makes it feel pretentious and never disrespects the subject. She takes great care and has fun with the audience in the process.

Such a loving, unique film, reflecting both artists beautifully. We get some of the traditional elements that might make up a biography, like Birkin looking through childhood photos, describing her early life, and with her brother revisiting her childhood home, now demolished, each recalling little details and games they played. We also get Varda putting her into a number of skits, riffing on things Birkin has said or playfully exploring her in various scenarios. Some of these things seem quite random but through it all a real sense for who both Birkin and Varda are emerge, which was really quite lovely. One thing I can say is that Birkin would have made a fierce Calamity Jane, or Joan of Arc. Also, her bulldog is adorable.

Quotes from Jane B.

On looking directly into the camera: "It's embarrassing. It's too personal. It's like staring at someone."

"What I'd really like is to make a whole film about how I really am, with my jeans, old sweaters, messy hair, pajamas, barefoot in my garden. For once I'd like to forget about wigs and pretty costumes. I'd like to be filmed as if I were transparent, anonymous, as if I were just anyone."

"I'm know I'm very spoiled. But that doesn't mean I'm never lonely. You can be spoiled and lonely. Covered in flowers and lonely."

"I guess I only like lost people."

On Marilyn Monroe: "She was like a naïve muse, inspiring our dreams of being beautiful."

"This sort of statuesque perfection leaves me unmoved. I like a man's or a woman's body with or perhaps precisely because of its flaws."

"I like melancholy, so I write in the past tense... I remember how I loved him..."

Quotes from Agnes V.

"Why would I make this film? Because you're beautiful. Like a chance encounter on an editing table between a perky tomboy and an Eve in modeling clay."

On Birkin wanting to work with Marlon Brando: "Too expensive. How about a French actor, almost as good but cheaper?"

"I prefer daydreams to psychology. I like to jump around, toy with chance, with fleeting emotions and events."

On Jane B. Wanting to be liked but also to be anonymous: "You dream of being a famous nobody."

"It's like a jigsaw puzzle, fitting one piece here, one there. A picture gradually appears, even with a hole in the middle. But there can be a lull even at the finest parties."

This is in a format I wish we would get more of, the cinematic portrait. Marker and Godard would work out examples in a few years time, several of Herzog's work are portraits. The added benefit with these is that, while we're still looking for life, they don't have to step through the structured formalities of drama to get to the person, the format permits an improvised reach, one of a few formats that do.

But someone still has to pose for them and a filmmaker has to take it down with his brush, apply colors. This is uneven in both respects. One reason why lies in a fundamental mismatch I perceive here. It's actress Jane Birkin posing for Varda; Birkin is outgoing, sad or lonely in the mannered way of someone accustomed to the presence of a camera, used to grooming a self. Varda on the other hand is drawn to the enigmas of ragged women, introverts or haunted in some way, or at any rate does her best work in the whirl of what is not fully controlled. She manages to find no interesting entry here.

Not having found that entry, we get various enactments on a stage instead, Birkin as Tarzan's Jane or Joan of Arc, in a picnic with her French idol, coteries of costumed people enacting tableaux, poses for the camera and blathering vignettes. At so few points do we pierce through cute play-acting to get the elusive stuff that life is made of, at something not rehearsed because a camera will film it, ending up with the equivalent of a surreal magazine spread on a known face. So when it sorts itself out, it's less than the sum of its colors, merely a face.

A miss. Still, Varda manages to come up with flashes of inspiration in all this, she's always adept with pouring images, stirring flows of them. Above all the whole segment of Birkin rehearsing with Serge Gainsbourg - Birkin's ex-lover - is a small gem of intricately edited resonance, the only instance where Varda can hint at something on the other side of images.

Jane B by Agnes V is on the surface perhaps a seemingly minor work by one of those giants of cinema that we are still taking for granted after they've left us, but it is so special in parricular because Varda sees that cinema should be playful and about how much truth can come in pretending to be someone else. We may even be so invested in a character in the actions and emotions that we can be more at ease than in our every day lives.

Jane Birkin was near 40 and was lamenting this to Varda and she tried to assuage her at first by saying "oh, turning 40 is fine," but then realized a better way to do this would be to give her a kind of living tribute - instead of what people get when they're at like am AFI dinner or at the Governor's awards seeing a highlight reel, it would be much more enlightening and entertaining to do this while someone, like the versatile and talented Birkin, is alive and create some scenes for them to play.

The movie is about the joy and thrills of movies and about what playing characters brings out in a performer, and what being artistically engaged and creating art can do for us. Jane takes on characters she likely wanted to play (and/or Varda had in her head to want to see on screen played by someone like Jane Birkin), and that goes from Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy (complete with a pie fight!) to being the subject of a Renaissance painting come to life, to a character caught in a crime drama with guns, to Joan of Arc and even Jane of Tarzan (though in reality Birkin wishes more to be like a Mowgli ala the Jungle Book).

Varda staged and directs these scenes with as many resources as she can muster (albeit she mentions one idea Jane has cant be executed because it would need more time = more money), and while a couple are too frivolous to remember most are really engaging and fun. What I found interesting was that sometimes, though not all the time of course, Birkin seems more natural at doing these comedic and dramatic scenes than being interviewed about her life. We all have to put on a sort of "character" when just talking to a camera or to anyone really, or Birkin did her own kind of rehearsal for details about her family life and her kids and so on.

This doesn't take away from the film, so if this sounds like a criticism it is more of an observation; it is just fascinating to see someone who is so much more comfortable and empowered in the act of performance, in doing these scenes that she has maybe not even dreamed of persay because, after all, it is not every day Agnes Varda shows up to create cinematic sketches that include Tarzan and/or Jean-Pierre Leaud. There's even the perfectly surreal sight of everyone naked at a casino (including of course Jane herself).

On one level there is the act of doing these scenes, on individual wish-fulfillment terms and, for example, the crime storyline even has a kind of set up that pays off later on in the film (I didnt expect for that sketch to return, but it does and it is still enjoyable if kind of fluff in its genre pastiche way), and on the deeper level is why this was done at all.

Part of it is Varda revealing herself on a more fundamental lecel as an artist as well - on Criterion channel she said it is a document of painter and subject, meaning herself as well, and to wit her son Matthieu does a scene with Jane as well (this the same year he performed in Kung Fu Master, no less) - so Jane B by Agnes V is even more satisfying for what it says about creating and the act of image-making, and why in a very real sense realizing dreams is important for humanity to have vitality.