1988 in Film: Jane B by Agnes V

Actress Jane Birkin exists in multitudes. From Rivettian chess piece in Love on the Ground and La Belle Noiseuse to unsteady androgynous lover in La Pirate and Je t’aime moi non plus, her career moves from Don Juan to George Harrison, always masks of characters and public image. What Agnès Varda does in Jane B by Agnès V re-fragments the actress. Here, she is a mother, just the same as she is the reclining muse, or a reflection in a mirror. Known stateside best for a bag named after her, the film is a challenge to how we perceive this image of the star.

For Independent Magazine, Varda once said “She wants to play every role and feel everything. What I like the most about Jane is that she wants us to look at her, to love her, but she also wants to be anonymous, not to be known. It’s very touching, do you agree?” in regards to Jane Birkin. Her film manages to accomplish this to a T, allowing her camera to wander through Jane’s life, but never for the reasons the media may want. It’s never for gossip, allowing the actress to define herself in her own terms.

“I was like any other mother, except more photographed.” Birkin then smiles, as she recollects the image shown, of her nude, chained to a radiator. Scenes stretch Birkin’s image, casting her in roles from Laurel & Hardy to Joan of Arc, are playful skits. For those seeing her for the first time, it’s hard to believe she is a great actress from just these scenes because they are left unrehearsed. Birkin is cast in everything, if only for moments, from a crime drama to slapstick. It’s a series of what ifs, imagined scenarios of where else the acting world could have taken her.

Though often cited as a play on Manet’s Olympia, a key shot shows Birkin as Agostino Rosi’s Venus of Urbino. However, instead of the natural voyeur of the painting, with its subject gazing slightly askew, Varda’s Venus meets our eye. Birkin is fully clothed, though in a translucent pale gown, and we do not see her in the way we see the soft curves of the original Venus. Here, we are taunted with our own imaginations, asked if we will imagine what we can nearly see through the thin fabric, challenged by meeting the eye of the object of desire.

1988 in Film: Nuovo cinema Paradiso / Cinema Paradiso

Imitation leads to homage, and character leads to a visual study. A recent series of paintings from artist Jenna Gribbon (some may know her for painting album covers for her partner, who releases music under the name Torres) depicts Varda’s work in a playful, reflective sense. The series, titled Agnès V by Jenna G  is a play on the title of the film, and serves a similar function. Gribbon’s painting style uses bright, visible brushstrokes, giving a sense of motion to still flesh. 

Her work is often casual nudes, depicting bare bodies as naturally as the furnishings of the room, but here, her Varda homage is simply that. Just as Varda’s documentary creates a well-rounded Jane Birkin, only using her sexual symbolism to play with, but to never pry, Jenna Gribbon has a bright, playful imitation that leaves these screen images as they are, not picking and choosing for sensual imagery. As bluntly as Jane B by Agnès V chooses to discuss the erotic cinema image of Birkin by blending it into the rest of her world, the paintings do not harp on idle worship either.

The actress is most enticing here when we settle down and focus on personality. If the film is a gift to unveil the real Birkin, then allowing these more honest storytimes to shine is what makes it work. Of course, these conversations are not without their abrupt, playful editing, diverting into mirrorball reflections and museum backdrops, once again building new characters and tearing them down. Varda is Birkin’s mirror, who considers Birkin the screen icon a part of the real actress, because artifice and image all boil down to the root.

74th Festival de Cannes: Here are the Films of the Official Selection

After the 80s, Jane Birkin’s film career would significantly lull. In the same year, she released Kung-Fu Master, a morally challenging story about a woman in her forties who falls in love with a boy not yet sixteen. This film, despite its quirky title, goes against the twee “grandmother of cinema” image that Agnès Varda has so often been pinned with. The film neither endorses this love, nor does it villainize its lead, elegantly showing a discomforting relation with a sadness in how its lead reflects on her life.

Birkin would work with Varda a final time after Jane B by Agnès V in One Hundred and One Nights. Monsieur Cinema invites a line of movie stars to tell him stories, as he recalls all of the movies he had once made. Among them are film students, a new generation, looking to fund and tell stories, who invite him to play in their film as their paths converge. The film is a fitting final work of fiction, though documenteur Varda is often at her most fantastical. 

Her later career is for the most part reflective, though it does come with exceptions like Catherine Corsini’s underseen The Very Merry Widows, with Birkin alongside Émilie Dequenne as grandmother and granddaughter learning to marry (and kill) rich. Charlotte Gainsbourg is premiering Jane par Charlotte, another reflective document of the actress, this time through the eyes of her daughter, at Cannes this year.