FILM
Varda’s Farewell Address
Stubbornly independent pioneer looks back in final offering
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Agnès Varda saw the future.
From the very start
of her career as a fi lmmaker,
she tried to work
as a one-woman band, eventually
achieving a rare independence
through digital video. Her debut
feature “La Pointe Courte” paved
the way for the French New Wave,
but she stood apart from her colleagues
there because she never
abandoned shorts and documentaries.
Perhaps her status as a
perpetually underrated director,
tied to a sexist condescension, kept
her from limiting cinema to a narrative
feature running at least 80
minutes. If one is barely granted
entry to an art form, there’s no
need to honor its rules (although
men like Chris Marker and Jean-
Luc Godard also realized the rules
shouldn’t constrain them).
Varda kept getting re-introduced
Those Who Return from the Sea in Ships
Realism left behind to probe Senegalese hopes for good life
BY STEVE ERICKSON
French director Mati Diop’s
“Atlantics,” set in Senegal,
describes a quest for freedom
that plays in simple
terms — the desire to love the person
one chooses and to work a job
that’s not exploitative. But the fi lm’s
characters have to leave reality behind
for their goals to be lived out.
Many of its characters even have to
die to accomplish their quests. The
opening scenes promise a brand
of Global South neo-neo-realism
that’s very familiar on the festival
circuit, but thankfully Diop has
far more imagination, turning toward
the ghost story.
A tower is being built in a Dakar
suburb, but its construction workers
are being ripped off. Angered by
management’s refusal to pay them,
they become fed up with poverty
in Senegal and try emigrating by
Agnès Varda giving a masterclass, as seen in “Varda by Agnès,” which opens November 22 and Film
Forum and Lincoln Center.
to American audiences, with “Vagabond,”
“The Gleaners and I,” and
her penultimate fi lm “Faces Places.”
By an ironic twist, “Faces Places”
turned out to be by far her most
popular release in the US, benefi ting
Ibrahima Traoré in Mati Diop’s “Atlantics,” which screens November 22-28 at the Museum of Modern Art.
boat to Spain. Souleiman (Ibrahima
Traoré) leaves behind his
lover Ada (Mama Sané), who is in
fact another man’s fi ancé, having
been promised to in an arranged
marriage without knowing him.
MK2 AND JANUS FILMS
from the support of a distributor,
the Cohen Media Group, which
also owned the theater, the Quad,
where it earned a substantial percentage
of its gross. Her fi nal fi lm
“Varda by Agnès” premiered at this
NETFLIX
Souleiman’s boat capsizes, and
the men are presumed dead. But
as Ada plans for the wedding, Dakar
is gripped by mysterious fi res.
Strange events hint that Souleiman’s
spirit may have returned.
year’s Berlin Film Festival only a
month before her death.
Film at Lincoln Center plans a
Varda retrospective starting December
20. “Varda by Agnès” runs
down her thoughts on her major
fi lms in a few minutes. It is based
around two lectures she gave at
MoMA and the Cartier Foundation
For Contemporary Art. It says
something about Varda’s capacity
to disrupt our categories that this
fi lm has been dismissed as a TED
Talk rather than a real movie. But
the exciting thing about it is that it
might be both.
There’s even a technocratic element
to “Varda by Agnès”: she
praises the liberating potential of
the digital camera. “The Gleaners
and I,” a documentary she made
in 2000 about people scavenging
for useful but discarded food and
objects, saw a radical value in it.
➤ AGNÈS VARDA, continued on p.29
Much of “Atlantics” takes place
by a beach in Dakar, and the fi lm’s
title indicates the importance the
sea plays in it. It’s full of images
of crashing waves, sometimes as
a backdrop but often depicted in
a more abstract way. The sound
of crashing waves plays over the
closing credits. For West Africans,
the Atlantic has a tragic connotation.
Many among their ancestors
were kidnapped across the ocean
to become slaves in North America,
and in recent years scores of
immigrants have tried to navigate
from Africa to Europe by sea,
sometimes losing their lives in the
attempt. “Atlantics” imagines an
Africa where men and women can
return from the sea with the ability
to take their lives back.
“Atlantics” pulls ideas from sci-fi
and horror. Its idea of life in Dakar
➤ ATLANTICS, continued on p.29
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