“Uncle Yanco”
Blessed are we who can point at the Uncle Yanco in our own family trees. My Uncle Yanco was Uncle John, the sole possessor of my family’s latent tall gene and a lifelong handlebar mustache advocate; he made me drink shots of ouzo at my rehearsal dinner, off the floor and without using my hands. He passed last year. I miss him. But “Uncle Yanco,” the first meeting between Varda and her wacky bohemian granduncle, a Greek immigrant and cartoon character made flesh, opens a door to revisit memories of John, a man I’m lucky to call family. No matter her subject, no matter the movie, Varda always looks for color even if color exists only in the margins. “Uncle Yanco” hinges on a reverse dynamic: She can’t help finding color, as Yanco has built for himself a world comprising a riot of colors. Their introduction is warm, welcoming, and invites viewers to be, if only for 20 minutes, part of her family, which means folks who don’t have an Uncle Yanco to claim as their own can borrow hers.
“L’Opera Mouffe”
The stream of consciousness technique Varda uses in this short, one part documentary and one part personal essay (being a piece she made while pregnant with her daughter, Rosalie), adds lightheartedness to otherwise heavy work. Note the division she identifies between fertility, seen in the theme of blossoming first love and in shots of produce on display at the market, and destitution, seen in images of the homeless and hungry living on Rue Mouffetard in Paris’ 5th arrondissement, which happens also to be one of the oldest in the city. Life and death. Contentment and starvation. The film’s dual meanings give Varda’s chosen aesthetic here, which one might call “lyrical” and which often reads as improvised, a necessary gravity for keeping viewers anchored in place. This is one of her self-described favorite pieces, and maybe the experimentation explains why: This is a work unrecognizable from so much else in her oeuvre, but it’s Varda at her most Varda as well.
“Le Bonheur”
François loves his wife, Thérèse, and he loves their two adorable children, Pierrot and Gisou. After meeting postal worker Émilie once or twice, he decides that he loves her, too, and they start screwing around behind Thérèse’s back, all in service to keeping his happy cup full to the brim. Maybe François deserves a little more credit than that. This is, after all, Varda, and Varda isn’t the ungenerous sort. But “Le Bonheur” ends on a cold note dressed up in fall sweaters, and even at its most open-minded and empathetic, it’s a movie about a man hoarding happiness at the expense of the people he says he loves, as if asking Thérèse and Émilie to accept his shameless two-timing as a supplement to their own happiness. Not to spoil the show, but it isn’t, and the stark contrast Varda strikes love’s pricklier complications and buoyant charm makes the ultimate conclusion “Le Bonheur” arrives at all the more harrowing.
“La Pointe Courte”
Speaking of complicated love, here’s Lui and Elle, a married couple working through the splinters in their relationship in the small fishing village where Lui grew up. “La Pointe Courte” is Varda’s first picture, but the relationship between it and “Le Bonheur” as the unsettling alternative portrait of the wounds infidelity leaves on a couple gains visibility through the set’s assembly. Likewise, “La Pointe Courte” establishes her fondness for the working class, for people on the margins, for the struggles they accept to get through the day: As Lui and Elle stroll around town, the camera turns toward men on boats, skirting authority as they dig shellfish out of lagoons forbidden by fishing inspectors on account of a bacterial bloom. She ennobles their efforts to make a living under the constraints of law equally as she dissects love’s knottier component parts; the message made simple is that life is one big tangle of regulated feelings, but the simplest pleasure of all is Varda’s tranquil filmmaking. Watching “La Pointe Courte” feels like a 90-minute caress.
“Kung Fu Master!”
Not a kung fu movie, unfortunately, because the idea of Agnès Varda directing a martial arts fight scene is bizarrely appealing, but a movie about childish pursuits sought out by both a child, Julien, and a woman mature enough to know better, Mary-Jane. “The heart wants what it wants,” Emily Dickinson once said; an affair between a middle-aged single mother and her daughter’s teenage classmate falls under that umbrella. But people tend to forget the second half of the Dickinson quote, being “or else it does not care,” and this is the real “stuff” of “Kung Fu Master!” The romance almost reads like window dressing. It’s the fear beneath the romance–of being judged, to start, or worse, being forgotten by one’s lover as if the romance meant nothing–that drives the film.