Documenteur

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.

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.

I see where the reviews below are almost equally divided between Varda lovers and haters. So let me perversely fall somewhere in the middle with perhaps a slight predilection toward the adoration side of the spectrum.

God knows the haters' case is easy to make. Exhibit A is the bad acting from the subsidiary members of the cast. I mean the gal who plays the waitress friend of the mom and the guy who plays her ex are so stiff and without nuance in their line deliveries it is almost as if Varda directed them to be crappy. And exhibit B is that pseudo profound narration by the mom which Varda wisely soft peddles about halfway through, as if she realizes it's boring as hell to listen to.

But, hey, I lived in pre gentrified Venice at about the time this thing was made and it really took me back, so I'm pre disposed to like it. And as lousy as the co stars were the two leads, played by Varda's kid Matthieu Demy and especially Sabine Mamou, were excellent. And finally, and most importantly, I was taken by the film's understated, but stronger for that, message of indomitability in the face of adversity. Quite a stark contrast with the working single mom protagionist of "Jeanne Dielman", directed by the current darling of the avant garde, Chantal Akerman, whose instinct, first last and always, is to give up.

Give it a B minus.

'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.

This has to be one of the most underrated film in the history of cinema and for sure among the best films to come out of the 80s.

Documenteur starts where Agnès Varda's Mur Murs ends, but they have very little in common and do not need to be seen together.

Mur Murs is all about the external life of people. What we put on the outside of your walls. Documenteur is about our internal life, what we hide.

The title may suggest that it is a documentary but it is not. It is filmed in a documentary style, very much like Abbas Kiarostami did in his Koker trilogy. It is also inspired by her own life and Agnès Varda even uses her own son and her own editor (Sabine Mamou) to play the roles of Varda's assistance (but in reality both are a stand in for Agnès Varda and her own son). In one scene Sabine Mamou reads the narration for Mur Murs and when it is played back, we hear the voice of Varda. Sabine Mamou asks if this is really her voice and is told that we usually don't recognize our own voice. Agnès Varda was making a film about her own life but did not realize before much later that she had made a self biographic film. She did not recognize her own voice. Art imitates life.

This is a hauntingly beautiful film. Poetic, ambivalent, melancholic and meditative. It takes place in LA and a lot of the shots are at the shore. The west was a symbol of hope. But what happens when you can't go any farther west? When you are at the shore and you have lost hope, you are full of desires you can't fulfill, your life is fleeting way and you feel like you are drifting farther and farther from where you want to be.

There is almost no story here. The film focuses on emotions, a state of mind. If you like atmospheric and poetic films then this masterpiece is your cup of tea. Watch it and spread the good news. This film needs to be seen!