Agnes Varda Retrospective Finale:
Les Dites Cariatides/Kung-Fu Master
The UW Cinematheque Agnes Varda retrospective ended tonight with a screening of the short documentary
Les Dites Cariatides/The So-Called Caryatids and the 1987 feature
Kung-fu Master (named after the eponymous 1980s video game).
Les Dites Cariatides (1984) is a 12 minute long documentary, originally commissioned by French television. It’s another essayistic rumination, in the style of
Ulysse and
Les Salut Cubains (I have to note, with the exception of
Le Bonheur, I’ve enjoyed her three short documentaries much more than her features), this time taking the subject of Parisian caryatids: sculptures, usually women (with a few men), usually semi-clothed or nude, that serve as columns and adornments to buildings, in a neo-classical style (actually, neo-neo-classical, since all of the caryatids featured in the film were created between 1860-1870).
Again, we get a beautifully photographed film, dominated by a somber color palette of grays, blues, and greens. Varda’s camera gracefully sweeps up across the height of the caryatids (equally graceful is the music by Jean-Phillipe Rameau and Jacques Offenbach); as in her previous short documentaries, Varda narrates the film, musing on various related subjects. The film begins on an almost fanciful, comic note; Varda’s camera dwells on a female nude, an old street lamp, as she notes how common it is for Parisians to see the nude form in cold stone or iron, but how little and how shocked they are to see it in the flesh. As she narrates, a man, about twenty, nonchalantly exits his apartment and strolls down a Parisian boulevard completely naked (the double take of a passing motorcyclist is hilarious).
After visually examining several caryatids, Varda tells us their supposed history: during a war between the Greeks and Persians, a Greek city called Karyatis sided with the losing Persians. The vengeful Greeks slew all of the men and enslaved the women, parading the noblewomen through the streets in the finements as a sign of victory, and the usage of caryatids instead of columns was a symbolization of this victory. Soon after that, Varda compares the few male caryatids to the more numerous female ones: the men are burly and muscular, like Atlas, visibly straining under the effort of their work; the women are graceful, beautiful and expected to balance and bear their burden without visible effort (Varda compares several caryatids to some still photographs she took of working women balancing various goods atop their head). After noting that all of the caryatids in her films were built in the 1860s, Varda begins to note the exemplars of French culture that lived and worked during that era, focusing particularly on the poet Baudelaire (she makes the segue by focusing on a female caryatid, hiding it’s weeping face, while recounting the tale of Baudelaire and the love of his life, who he worshipped until she gave himself; afterwards, she was “just a woman” to him). Varda begins to retell the story of Baudelaire’s later life, and then reads his poems, using the images of neo-classical Paris, in the guise of the caryatids, to evoke the melancholy feelings created by the poetry.
The film ends with a short sequence focusing on a rather strange, angelic caryatid that adorns the side of a building; despite it’s large size, nobody seems to really notice the statuary; when cleaners vigorously scrub the caryatid, only a few onlookers gaze upon them curiously. The film ends with a crane shot, Varda’s camera glides up across the the massive caryatid, until it reaches the anonymous rooftops of Paris and it’s cold gray sky. The camera lingers for a few moments, before the film ends.
Now onto
Kung-Fu Master, which was, well....interesting (kind of like my earlier reaction to
Lion’s Love); it tells the story of the inevitably doomed romance between middle-aged, Parisian divorcee Mary Jane (Jane Birkin) and 14-year old Julien (Mathieu Demy, Agnes Varda’s son). The film was shot concurrently with another Varda film
Jane B. by Agnes V. (which I haven’t seen); according to the program notes (which quotes an article that appeared in
American Film), “One day [Jane] came to me and said, ‘If I have to fictionalize myself, I would very like [sic] to be a woman I wrote about.’ She had written a fantasy about being in love with a very young boy.” I have to say that the romance between wispy, androgynous Mary Jane (like Birkin, Mary Jane is a British woman living in Paris) and the fresh-faced, wide-eyed Julien joins
Murmur in the Heart and
The Major and the Minor as films with rather unique takes upon taboo subjects.
The film takes it’s name from Julien’s favorite video game (for anyone not familiar with the game, it’s plot is that the hero Thomas, has to fight through five levels of a pagoda to rescue his beloved Sylvia). The film itself opens with a rather comical tracking shot of Julien, wearing a white do-gi, walking (with the camera a bit speeded up) down the sidewalk to the music and sound effects of the
Kung-fu Master game. Julien walks in a very stylized manner, stutter stepping like a crude video game image; occasionally he punches or kicks very stiffly, again like the video game, until he comes across a shopkeeper with a big stick, who proceeds to stiffly whack Julien over the head until Julien’s punches send the man walking backwards in defeat. It’s a very odd beginning to a very odd film, but it is very apt. Julien approaches life and love like the video game hero, with determination and a single-minded pursuit.
The film proper begins at an afternoon birthday party for Mary Jane’s daughter Lucy, played by Birkin’s real-life daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg; Birkin’s other daughter, Lou Doillon, plays Lou, Mary Jane’s younger daughter. Like in
Le Bonheur, Varda has a real-family basically play versions of themselves (a completely random side-note, Charlotte Gainsbourg plays a version of herself in the film
My Wife is an Actress), to the extent that Birkin’s real-life parents appear in the film also, as Mary Jane’s parents. To take the documentary impulse even further, they even shot in in Birkin’s real life Paris apartment (and I am assuming that they shot in her parent’s house too later in the film). According to Varda (quoting the program notes again) “Jane Birkin has a very nice word about that. She says, ‘On set, no matter how well made, if you open a drawer, there is nothing in it. I like to open a drawer in which there is life.’ That was her choice, to be in her own house. I jumped on that idea and that fantasy of hers because it was also meeting my own aims in filming.”
The lonely, recently divorced Mary Jane meets Julien at the beforementioned birthday party. The other boys got him drunk. Sick in the bathroom, Julien is helped by Mary Jane. Julien is put-upon, he’s short, even the girls tower over him, and he has braces; he’s smart and kind of loner, and so the other kids make fun of him. Mary Jane is drawn to him after she witnesses him watching her sing a lullaby to an ill Lou, noting his quietness and sensitivity. They begin meeting around town, against her better judgment, even going around to various cafes and arcades looking for his favorite game. Julien invites Mary Jane over to his cousin’s house, which turns out to be a hotel, and he is very forward, trying to kiss her in the lift. At this point, Mary Jane pushes him away and rebukes him, but she continues to be drawn to him. Unbeknownst to her, Julien and Lucy bond during a school project (Lucy develops a crush upon him), and he gets himself invited on the family spring break trip to London.
They have a nice time at first, but Easter morning, Lucy catches Julien and Mary Jane kissing, and is disgusted. After a particularly tense Easter breakfast, with a lot of knowing glances exchanged, Mary Jane’s mother improbably tells her daughter to test their love by going off to a deserted island without Lucy.
Mary Jane, Julien, and Lou travel to the island, with it’s isolated vacation cottage. The three of them spend an apparently wonderful time with each other on the island (Varda is thankfully vague on how physically intimate Mary Jane and Juien are, though they share a sleeping bag), but as time goes on, Julien seems to lose interest. This pastoral romance is almost like a fantastic interlude. And as we watch the three of them leave the island by boat, Mary Jane’s voice-over proceeds to inform us of the coming disaster. Everyone has learned about their relationship, and in a series of lingering shots, glowering close-ups of all of the authority figures in Julien’s life, we learn about the disastrous consequences of their relationship (this sequence of shots ends with a close-up of Julien): Julien is forced to leave his school, and may never see Mary Jane again; Lucy too is forced to change schools, and her father takes her away from Mary Jane. Dejected, and even more lonely than before, Mary Jane continues to love Julien.
Three important scenes conclude the film:
Julien finally beats the the
Kung fu Master game (the game itself ends by announcing the tenuous future of Thomas and Sylvia’s romance), and since he can not contact Mary Jane himself, he has a cafe worker phone her for him. The cafe worker grudgingly does it, but when Lou answers the phone, he says “Screw This,” and hangs-up. This is the last time either of the two lovers attempt to contact each other. The second important scene is when Mary Jane and Lucy reconcile, with a mother-daughter talk about boys. Prompted by their conversation, Mary Jane confesses that her greatest fear is that Julien will disparage their relationship. The film ends with Julien, at his new school, cooly dragging on a cigarette, bragging crassly to his new friends about his relationship with Mary Jane. The sensitivity is gone, Julien’s face is much, much harder. Like the tale of Baudelaire in
Les Dites Cariatides, Julien loves and worships until he possesses, and then the luster wears off and things end badly, leaving him bitter.
Something else about the movie, is how it is shot-through with a rather didactic message about AIDS prevention (something very timely given the film’s late 1980s setting). Some random asides from this facet of the film, during the film, all I kept thinking of was Mathieu Demy’s performance as the HIV+ lover in the Jacques Demy-like musical
Jeanne and the Perfect Guy. Post-film viewing, after I went on the Internet for more information about Jane Birkin (I recognized her, but didn’t know much about her until after the screening), and learned she was an embodiment of swinging London in the 1960s and 1970s (her first film appearance was in Richard Lester’s
The Knack...And How to Get It and she was one of the models in Antonioni’s
Blow-Up) and sang a song called "Je'taime-Moi Non Plus,” which was banned by the BBC (and called the sexiest song ever recorded by one website). I just found that kind of ironic, in a film with such a strong safe-sex message and strange intimate relationship
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