Strong and Moving!

Great Film overall

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

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.

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.

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.