Somewhere near the mid-point of Agnes Varda’s experimental documentary Jane B. par Agnès V., she tells Jane Birkin, her film’s star, “You’re the queen of paradox. You want stardom and its perks: money, glamour, fame. You are different, but want to seem nondescript. You dream of being a famous nobody.” It’s as good a handle on Birkin as any, and is still insufficient. An icon of Swinging ‘60s London, Birkin long ago entered the realm of pop culture mythology (actress, muse, sex symbol, free spirit,) which necessarily means she’s been flattened out, shorn of layers and complexity.
Varda’s 1987 film employs fiction (multiple fictions) to get at truth, to push beyond the mythology. Her camera follows Birkin across various sets and locations as she talks about her life, famous loves, and career with arid self-deprecation. Many of those settings are tableaux created to replicate famous paintings (references to Varda’s lifelong love of great paintings and painters occurs throughout her oeuvre,) bring to life bits of Jane’s imagination, or allow the legendary director to share moments from her own life that she uses to illuminate something of Birkin’s psyche or lived experience. Interestingly, none of these set pieces are as captivating or illuminating as Birkin’s recounting of her own life. As the film detonates form by dipping across disciplines and genres, it plays with perceptions of truth and reality (which, of course, are not synonymous,) authenticity and performance. It artfully and playfully dissects identity (gender, sexuality, parenthood, artist) and shows the effort it takes to construct it. It’s an unabashedly feminist work that uses its famous subject to get at larger multiple truths.
Jane Birkin (left) and Agnes Varda on the set of ‘Jane B. par Agnès V.’
In Varda’s hands, tools of the documentarian’s trade are subverted. Yes, she employs old family photos, still images culled from across Birkin’s career and private/public life, and scenes from movies both real and imagined. But she shuffles them in unexpected ways, lets her camera linger on moments that others might edit out altogether, distorts images and disrupts passive consumption of them. She extracts philosophical moments from the banal (after she has Birkin empty a massive and stunningly overstuffed purse, Birkin remarks, “When you show it all, you reveal little,” commentary – obviously – on how her high public profile and media-dissected private life actually told the world very little about her real life.) As Birkin discusses the famous men she married (or didn’t) and had children with (Serge Gainsbourg, Lou , John Barry, Jacques Doillon, ) her contentment in conventional gender roles within an unconventional life, happiness at playing the muse, and a shyness that commingles with a natural submissiveness, if not passiveness, it all complicates and sometimes contradicts her longstanding image. But Varda never passes judgment, even when she – both on camera and off – pushes the almost preternaturally shy Birkin outside her comfort zones of thought and performance. Instead, she’s crafted an intriguing, provocative look at celebrity that doubles as a meditation on woman as artist, woman as mother, woman as woman.
Mathieu Demy and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Kung Fu Master
In Jane B., Birkin teases an idea she has for a film about a 40-year-old woman who falls in love with a teen boy who’s the friend of her daughter. The concept is fleshed out in Varda’s film Kung-Fu Master!, which stars her real life son Mathieu Demy as the boy, and Birkin’s teen daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg (already a commanding screen presence) as her onscreen daughter. Varda sidesteps salaciousness to tackle issues of loneliness, aging social issues of the day, and the stepping into adulthood of the young teens. The two films work as dazzling companion pieces.
