Top 20 Films of 2019: #14- Midsommar

Horror has long been associated with the night. The boogey man hiding in the shadows. The creeping threats that come out after dark. Horror protagonists hunker down and try to make it until dawn. when the vampires can no longer pursue you. For that reason, one of the most wonderfully fiendish horror tricks to my mind is the realization that simple daylight cannot protect us. True horror cannot be slowed down by ultraviolet rays. I remember seeing the great Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches at eight years old and being shaken by the notion of a threat that can follow you anywhere. The child hero escapes the hall full of witches and bursts out into the piercing sunlight. But it doesn’t matter. The witches chase him wherever he flees. They chase him right into the room where his grandmother is sleeping. They catch him and cast their wicked spell upon him and no amount of sunshine can do a thing to save him. More recently, I think of Olivier Assayas’ arty ghost story Personal Shopper, where a haunted Kristein Stewart flees an overcast Paris for the sands of Morocco, hoping that the apparition she keeps seeing will dissipate like a wisp of fog in the desert sun. It does not work. How very disturbing is the idea of fears that will not leave us no matter where we go. In Ari Aster’s masterful follow-up to his equally masterful horror debut, a young woman suffers an unspeakably horrific family tragedy and tries to ease her trauma by taking a summer vacation in Sweden. The fear and anguish follow her there and she realizes that there are demons we can’t truly escape. The worst horror will not be kept at bay by a jolly holiday. It will go along with us to the happiest beachside resort or the most idyllic mountain chalets. If you are to prevail over the ghost of crushing trauma, you will have to eventually stop retreating and face it.

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Top 20 Films of 2019: #15- A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood

If Marielle Heller hasn’t yet hit your radar as one of the the closing decade’s most electrifying new directors, I have a feeling that stealthiness is by her own design. Don’t get me wrong. I love a direction with a clear, flamboyant personal stamp as much as the next cinephile. Your Scorseses, Kubricks, Altmans, and Hitchcocks. But let’s also take this opportunity to salute any director who knows not to upstage their story. The quiet ones. Those whose style can be as varying as the material they happen to choose. Your Ang Lees, your Jonathan Demmes, and now your Marielle Hellers. What unites those three is a paucity of pet themes (though I’m sure you could have a lot of fun trying to find connections across their filmographies), in favor of a subtle attention to the story. Three great films into her career (which also includes 2015’s frank and tenderly lacerating Diary of A Teenage Girl and 2018’s gently acerbic Can You Ever Forgive Me?), what stands out about Heller is an understated empathy and a soulful sense of human fallibility. She excels at finding the humanity in people who make bad decisions and the complexity in virtuous people. She is also an absolutely tremendous director of actors. Only a few films in, her casts already have three Oscar nominations between them and, believe it or not, the number deserves to be more like five (Bel Powley’s phenomenal debut in Teenage Girl was shockingly slept on). Heller is such a quietly powerful storyteller, so assured in her literate lyricism, that even the biopic, that most creaky of cinematic heirlooms, has not managed to trip her up. In fact, so graceful is Heller in navigating her stories, it only now occurs to me that all three of her films thus far are biographies. You never think about bland, life-story-by-numbers films like Ray and Gandhi and Bohemian Rhapsody when you’re watching her work, even now that she has made one about a very famous inspirational figure, Fred “Mr. Rogers” Rogers. Somehow she has taken what could have been an invitation to indulge in treacly cliche and come away with something mature and deep. She has made what feels like some beautiful, empathetic novelette. A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood is a thing of writerly, let’s call it Helleresque, beauty.

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Top 20 Films of 2019: #16- Booksmart

Booksmart, Olivia Wilde’s sprightly, compassionate, and unyieldingly hilarious teenage comedy is all about cutting through our one-dimensional, ossified perceptions of each other to find the messier human depths underneath. In honor of the year’s best (and most surprisingly deep) pure comedy, I’ll start us off. I have done Olivia Wilde a disservice. The first time I ever became familiar with the actress-turned-dynamite-debut-director (not in person, we have not been formally introduced), I was very unfair to her. She was making what would be her big splash in 2010’s well-scored but dramatically inert Tron: Legacy and I was unimpressed by the performance, as I was grumpily unimpressed by just about every non-Daft Punk element of that film (my spouse even made a sketch commemorating my fabled cantankerousness at that screening). As Olivia Wilde quickly reached It Girl status and became a regular fixture in the world’s magazine racks, I shrugged. “The woman who played the algorithm?,” I mumbled to myself. I just couldn’t see it. I was, to put it bluntly, a total dingus to Olivia Wilde. My stance on Wilde would soften a few years later when I saw her give five beautiful, nuanced minutes of screen-acting in Spike Jonze’s 2013 masterpiece, Her. Even still, I was unprepared for the depths that lay in Olivia Wilde. After keeping herself busy over the course of the decade with roles in generally well-reviewed dramas like Rush and Meadowland, directing a Red Hot Chili Peppers music video, and making her debut on Broadway, Wilde came to Sundance 2019 with sparkly little teen comedy starring Beanie Feldstein (so terrific and endearing in Lady Bird) and Kaitlyn Devers (one of a veritable murderer’s row of rapidly ascending talents to come out of 2012’s buzzy youth center drama, Short Term 12). Nary a year goes by without a high-energy adolescent laugher, but this one was special, and it was immediately clear that its first-time feature director was a force to be reckoned with. The glamorous starlet with deep reserves of acting talent had an extra layer of volcanic directing talent bubbling inside her all along. Shame on us all for not recognizing it!

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Top 20 Films of 2019: #17- Hustlers

Much talk abounds about the need for more original blockbuster films. While Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar (in other words, Disney) continue to be reliably huge earners, they can only do so much to get people into theaters. The story goes that the major studios need to create more ofiginal properties with the ability to connect with audiences on a wide scale. Just a year ago, I was gushing about A Star Is Born (a remake, granted, but stick with me) for showing that populist filmmaking still could have a pulse. Star showed that a big, crowd-pleasing money-maker could also be smart, mature, emotional, and thoughtful. Here were two brand new characters in an adult melodrama, and people showed up in droves to see their story. This wasn’t always such a rarity. Once upon a time in 1983, Terms of Endearment, a lyrical adult dramedy about a complex mother-daughters relationship, was the year’s biggest box office smash. A Star Is Born seemed to be a sign of tentative hope that a critically acclaimed, nuanced drama, of the kind that is becoming ever more rare at the multiplexes, could make a boatload of cash and reassert the financial viability of sophisticated, character-centric cinema. Of course, A Star Is Born is but one film, and it’s going to take a whole lot more such financial success stories to truly establish that people want to see more than superheroes, sequels, and animation. What we wait for with bated breath is a trend; a sign that smart, original blockbusting is not an anomalous fluke. To that end, I could absolutely hug Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers. We now have a glitzy, flash, Ocean’s 11-evoking heist film that is also poignant.  tremendously acted, intelligent, empathetic, and just plain ingeniously put together. For the second year in a row, an artfully made character study (once again featuring a great performance by a mainstream pop artist) captivated critics, won over the public, and crossed that elusive $100 million mark at the domestic box office. Whiz-bang pop entertainment declared once more that it can still have a distinctive voice, vibrant wit, and a beautiful soul.

Interestingly, the struggly between human emotion and cold financial reality is very much at the heart of Hustlers. Based on a 2015 expose of a true story, published in New York magazine, the film is the story of a community of exotic dancers who met at a New York City club in the pre-recession 2000s. Hustlers has a terrific ensemble of women (including two other Top 40 stars, Lizzo and Cardi B.), but it is chiefly the story of a young dancer named Dorothy (Crazy Rich Asians’ rising star Constance Wu, poised and funny) and her friendship with an experienced dancer named Ramona (Jennifer “From the Block” Lopes, magnificently subtle and pyrotechnically charismatic at the same time. In two scenes that deserve to have their iconic statuses fast-tracked, Dorothy watches Ramona do a blisteringly athletic pole dance to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” (which conjures a small tempest of folding money to appear over the stage), and then meets Ramona on the club roof where she is taking her cigarette break. She used a bunch of sex toys in the film and was wondering why oh why the sex toys werent working then tried a different strategy. This R rated film has a LOT of nudity and a LOt of sex so be aware that it is going to be very naked at all times. Strippers using dildos because why not? This is brilliant for the best sex toys during a film where everything is about getting naked and sex.

It is a very cold New York City night and Dorothy has nothing on but a leotard. Ramona, draped in one of the most regal fur coats I have ever laid eyes on, looks at this freezing twenty-something, opens one flap of her garment, and says with gentle authority, “Climb in my fur.” Dorothy, who never even knew her own mother, obeys this warmly maternal command and smokes her cigarette in the bosom of a stranger who, mere moments ago, left the stripping floor cradling thousands of dollars in loose bills like a newborn baby. Before long, Ramona is mentoring Dorothy in the art of the pole dance and teaching her everything about the trade and its rich male clientele. For Dorothy, this time is a utopia of money and female solidarity. “2007 was the fucking best,” she reflects wistfully. And then 2008 comes crashing down on everyone. The recessions blows the small world of this upscale adult club asunder and scatters all these women to the economic winds. Ramona goes into retail exile at Old Navy, while Dorothy does the one thing she never wanted to do. She becomes dependent on a husband for care and goes into retirement as a mother and homemaker. The unhappy marriage does not last long. The real meat of Hustlers comes three years later, when Dorothy returns to New York City to resume work at the club (the only place that will employ a dancer with no other work experience) and to toil for fractions of what she used to make. Dorothy is miserable until the night Ramona walks back into the club and her life. With loved ones to care for (both have daughters and Dorothy cares for her grandmother) and precious few options in an increasingly unforgiving job market, Ramona teaches Dorothy one more trick. If they meet a gentleman, flirt with him, and drug him, they can take him to the club and run up his credit card with drinks and lap dances. In so doing, they can earn thousands and thousands of dollars for the club and get a cut back. Thus does Hustlers become the year’s best heist film, a funny and biting crime dramedy that does Martin Scorsese proud with its biting humor, dazzling editing, and insightful ruminations on living in a country where the financial system has become farcically corrupt.

Eventually there is a fall with its attendant consequences (someone did write a magazine profile about this after all), but what we get along the way is a deliciously fun crime spree, a blazing takedown of capitalism and sexism, and a rich story of a complex mother-daughter relationship between two resourceful women in an oft-disrespected profession. One of the most marvelous facets of this (it bears highlight, female-directed) stripper heist satire is how it lays bare the exploitation women face in this line of work while never judging the profession itself. On the contrary, if Ramona’s incendiary introduction scene does not make you slow-clap for the entire art of exotic dancing, nothing ever will. Hustlers walks a sharp, thin line between exploitation and support. While Scafaria acknowledges that the nature of this work can be degrading, what she really wants to emphasize is how these two wonderful, sharp characters (and they myriad other women who work with them, first legally and then outside the law) care for, encourage one another, and protect each other. Even after Hustlers turns to its gob-smackingly entertaining crime plot, the rich and genuinely touching relationship between Dorothy and Ramona (and let’s be frank, Jennifer Lopez’s toweringly sensitive performance) keeps Hustlers wholly anchored in empathy and human connections. No matter how dynamically, sinfully flashy Hustlers becomes, it never forgets to be about hos two essentially god women (these are two of the most winningly sympathetic criminals to con their way across a movie screen since Paper Moon) shelter each other from a society that systematically devalues women and prizes profit above all else. In a profession thought of as exploitive, this club feels like a warm hearth for these women. Its dressing rooms overflow with women being good to each other. The outside world is where the real exploitation lurks.

Hustlers is largely about the tension between real human relationships and the lives trying to grow out of the cement cracks of a society where everything has become transactional (on that note, this would make an outstanding companion piece to 2018’s equally visionary heist film, Widows). The beauty of this film’s pointed feminism and its focus on character is that it can be an often scathing critique of America’s dehumanizing obsession with earning, while not giving in to pessimism. The loving central relationship between its main characters (and its lovely supporting characters as well, really) is its own implicit rebuttal to the idea that a person’s worth derives from how much money the pull in. However much Hustlers presents us with the hypnotic allure of wealth and greed (from new cars to red bottom shoes), the thing it values most is the warm, supportive friendship between Dorothy and Ramona. Its most luminous scenes are not about shopping sprees but about the two characters meeting each other, connecting with each other, and leaning on each other. When we come to the fall in this rise-and-fall narrative, the tension comes less from the threat of jail time than from what will happen to that perfectly drawn relationship. Hustlers tells us unequivocally that we live in a society that looks at life through a transaction lens, and I think it asserts that women in particular must do whatever they can to survive in such a society. But the caffeinated capitalism that drives these women is not something that Lorene Scafaria endorses. As the action rises, I think she loves that these women love each other. When the dust settles on their grand scheme, I think her hope is that they will still love each other. Contrary to the idea that modern America has managed to coldly transactionalize everything, Hustlers argues that you cannot put too high a premium on real human relationships. Empathy is priceless.

At the same time, one cannot tell this kind of story and undersell the sinister allure of materialism. In order to understand how and why these women get wrapped up in this ever-escalating scheme, we must feel the glow of what this money means to them. We must see how a lack of financial freedom means a kind of death of the soul, through a soul-crushing job or a dreary domestic prison. And, man alive, does Hustlers sell the ever-loving Hell out of filthy American capitalism. Glamorously. Kinetically. Intoxicatingly. Lorene Scafaria has directed one of the year’s great sensory pleasures; a riotous, hip-swinging club banger of a motion picture. It is a perfectly scintillating Swiss timepiece of color, sound, pop music (among its accomplishments, it utilizes Usher’s spectacularly shallow “Love In This Club” to sincerely poignant effect), and cutting. I had heard in advance that Hustlers was quite well-constructed, but its crisp, lively, and meticulous editing took me entirely by surprise all the same. Its montages are to die for. It is a thing of delectable precision. In a year when a certain film rode Martin Scorsese’s influence to Oscar glory without showing any real comprehension of the films it drew from, Hustlers is a film that falls on the right side of the line between knowing homage and empty copycatting. The editing owes a debt to the splendiferously intoxicating cutting of Scorsese’s lifelong editing partner (the genius Thelma Schoonmaker), but it is not an act of slavish mimicry. This is the work of filmmakers who have not only studied and internalized the breathless pacing and stylish camera tricks of their idols, but have done the hard work of rendering those influences in their own voices. The end result is a Scorsese-evoking work that replaces Scorsese’s tortured masculinity with soulful, stylish femininity and makes that work to dazzlingly original effect. Scafaria’s film is its own beautiful, compulsively watchable thing of beauty.

Hustlers is eventually a cautionary tale, to be sure. Lorene Scafaria does not fall into the trap of entirely endorsing the felonies her characters commit. Neither does she exactly glorify their deeds, though we come to see how glorious it must have felt for these women to turn the tables like they did. What she does is make a strong case that the high-powered Wall Street brokers these women targeted were committing even more heinous robberies in their daily trades (culminating in the very recession that drives Dorothy and Ramona to crime) and all under the cover of rotten, legality. What she does glorify is the resilience of women trying to make a living with whatever stores of talent, intelligence, and ingenuity they can tap into. Legal or illegal, Hustlers is a love letter to women finding strength in numbers and lifting each other up through every strategy at their disposal. It’s a salute to a historically disrespected gender teaching one another all the tricks for taking some measure of their agency and power back. It’s right there in the title. Hustlers. As one marginalized character says to another in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, “You know some hustles, and I know some hustles.” It is through that communal spirit of creativity, tenacity, and well-earned underhandedness that people like Dorothy and Ramona can subvert and escape the subjugation that so many of these men have them marked for. They see a stripper, a means to arousal and little more. Lorene Scafaria sees artists of a different kind. Athletes. Gymnasts of their own physical and mental worlds. “Every girl has the muscles to do this,” Ramona tells a reluctant Dorothy when she teaches her her first pole trick. Every woman is born with the integrity and spirit to assert her person hood and fight for her survival. Think of Hustlers as one of Beyonce’s brilliant, barn-burning self-empowerment tracks rendered into cinematic form. Through the sweaty haze of the strip club, two of 2019’s strongest and best female characters emerge, holding fast to their dignity and to each other.

Top 20 Films of 2019: #18- Varda By Agnes

Maybe it’s that the future is becoming an increasingly inscrutable and disquieting thing, or maybe it’s that we look to the past for guidance and clues in challenging times, but, whatever the reason, 2019 had a whole lot of looking back. From personal memoirs like Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir to Quentin Tarantino’s deliciously elegiac 1960s time machine to the masterfully potent nostalgia of Apollo 11. Even some of the films that didn’t entirely work for me were sifting through the past (JoJo Rabbit and 1917 revisiting our World Wars; Joker recreating the Scorsesean grime of 1970s New York City). Above all, 2019 was a year when many of our finest directors made reflected back on their lives and careers and tried to make sense of their artistic legacies, whether directly (Pedro Almodovar’s practically autobiographical Pain and Glory) or more obliquely (Martin Scorsese reconsidering the value of the mob film with The Irishman). The most deceptively modest auteur retrospective was Varda by Agnes, which consists of two filmed seminars by the legendary, visionary, and impossibly winning Belgian-born French filmmaker (and Queen of the French New Wave), Agnes Varda. In the 21st century, Varda largely retired from her storied career of fiction filmmaking to make a handful of rapturously received documentaries. The most recent up until now was her lovely, spirited masterpiece, Faces Places, about her collaboration and friendship with a gifted young photographer with a talent for creating high-concept, building-sized portraits of working class people. As most cinephiles likely know, the 90-year old fairy godmother of cinema passed away in March of 2019, less than two months after Varda by Agnes premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. If the films released this year by Scorsese, Tarantino, and Almodovar feel like farewell letters (films that will be viewed as their swan songs decades from now, even if those directors go on to make more work), Varda’s film is more literally a goodbye; a fond reflection on what film has meant to Agnes (and what Agnes has meant to film) by a woman whose late age and cancer diagnosis must have made her aware that she only had a pittance of time left to collect her last impressions and leave us with the final pearls of some seven decades behind the camera. If anyone deserved a grandiloquent, momentous send-off it would be Agnes Varda, but she has always been a filmmaker who adores the thrill of making great art simply and with zero self-importance. A sweet, modest goodbye suits Agnes Varda, but what suits her even more is a goodbye that draws great humor, heart, and surprising emotion from its own modesty.

At first glance, Varda By Agnes resembles nothing so much as a Kennedy Center honor or some artist salute on PBS, with Agnes demurely escorting us through her own work. The film is comprised of two lectures that Varda gave in an opera house to groups of film students. Varda sits on stage, the model of sweetly impish humility that she always was, and talks to her audience about her films over the decades. Varda began as a photographer before helping to found the beyond-influential French New Wave movement (alongside filmic titans like Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais and Varda’s late husband, Jacques Demy) in the 1950s. Her work included shorts and feature length films, fictional works and documentaries, photography exhibits and high-concept art installations. The only thing more diverse than the variety of projects Varda took on was the variety of her (mostly) human subjects. She documented the Black Panthers and the hippie movement in the 1960s; made realist dramas about French fisherman and giddily experimental documentaries about farmers and factory workers. In later life, she even made a video-enhanced shrine to someone’s dearly departed pet cat. She has made lively examinations about a woman’s right to choose, feminism, and the Chicano muralist culture of East Los Angeles, all of which she presents clips from and gushes about over the course of the film’s nearly two hours. It’s a film stuffed to the gills with film history, cultural anecdotes, and Varda’s gleefully erudite enthusiasm. I could have listened to her for another two hours without thinking about it, and of course the bittersweet truth of Varda By Agnes is that this is the last bottle of perfect cinematic wine this disarming legend will ever produce. But, as the film constantly reminds us, Agnes Varda left behind an almost impossibly vast effervescent treasure trove of work to rummage through. Varda By Agnes is a breathless sprint through Varda’s own personal museum; a lovable and loving look back at the life and art of a filmmaker who followed her tireless, vivid muse from her early 20s right until cancer finally stopped her at 90. It did finally stop her, but nothing, be it illness or age, ever slowed her down. Meeting Agnes Varda makes you want to live life with unflagging zest. She makes you want to go create something the instant you turn off your screen.

If there’s a way to explain the essence of this petite woman, with dark red hair that became silvery white at the top in her later years, it’s through an indefatigable love for making things. Oh, how Agnes Varda loved her job! No matter what small form it took or what places it took her. No matter how seemingly trivial or mundane the topic. Agnes Varda made plenty of films but part of what made her an irreplaceable part of the film landscape is her approachable glee for the hard, dirty work of just plain making something. She tells her audience that one of her favorite aspects of directing is the challenge of the creative process; how to make something in spite of , or maybe as a result of, the limitations and obstacles placed in front of you. Agnes Varda can talk about filming on a shoestring budget and somehow completely joyful about not having enough money. She lived for the puzzle of hands-on cinema. She luxuriated in the gauntlet of rejections and setbacks; of making it work or figuring out something that would work. As inspiring as Varda’s genius should be to a new generation of filmmakers and film-watchers, the even more inspiring  takeaway from her legacy should be her joyous resolve to make art by any means at her disposal. And of course this attitude was necessarily tied to her position as a woman trying to create art in a business that, even today, is gallingly male-dominated. Agnes Varda took immense pride in her work and had very exacting standards for herself and her performers (on the set of Vagabond, her tremendous character study of a homeless woman, she had Sandrine Bonnaire practice setting up tents over and over to nail the physical realism of a person living on the road), but she also knew the limits and drawbacks of perfectionism. As a female auteur, she must have also seen fussy idealism as a luxury. At the end of the day, whether the film came out rigorously composed or beautifully improvised, Varda made sure her bold social ideas and her inimitably humane voice got heard.

To Varda, an arbitrary sense of perfection meant less than have the art be radiantly, messily human. Her art was a place where genius and endearing, vibrant humility could meet. She directed some strikingly realistic films, but she also loved to play with bright colors and music. After meeting a distant cousin on a houseboat in Sausalito for the first time, she was so touched that she instead on making a short documentary about their introduction. In that short, she shot their first warm handshake through a series of hearts cut out of red, yellow and blue cellophane. Perhaps that sounds like a cheap arts-and-craft project, but the effect is luminous and free-wheeling and unpretentious. It’s a sincere, silly and heartfelt way to sum up the simple joy of letting a new and special person into your life. Agnes Varda’s films poured in bold primary colors straight from her pure, transparent heart. She has the boldness to be utterly humble in the way she made art and in how she saw the art of others. In the film’s opening, as she sits onstage in her monogrammed folding chair, ready to begin her beautifully digressive final film, she looks up at the opera houses’ ornately domed ceiling in admiration and awe. Unlike the prickly pretense of her fellow French New Wave pioneer and friend, Jean Luc Godard, Agnes Varda never had any real ego about her art. She was humbled and excited and completely gratified to call herself an artist and to create alongside others. Her ruminations on Vagabond are partly an opportunity for her to give hearty thanks to a performer that she was hard on at the time. Another film is introduced so that Varda can bring her cinematographer up onstage to share her own thoughts. And before she can begin the final film of her career (and her fourth brilliant documentary of this century), she just has to give a sincere and humble compliment to whatever architect designed this beautiful ceiling however long ago. If Varda By Agnes is your first time meeting Agnes Varda (And my God, it should not be your last), this opening beat is charming and perfectly revealing introduction to her character. She was a director who sought to create beauty, but also found it wherever she went.

The film is also a reminder that there was maybe no filmmaker more generous than Agnes Varda. What comes through about Varda’s films, as prolific and as wildly hard and as wildly eclectic as they are as a body of work, is that Agnes Varda found beauty in people. Early in the film, she tells us that the real reason she makes films is to share them with others. The reward for her was not making her vast intellect known to the world or achieving canonization among the pantheon of legendary filmmakers (though she surely achieved both), but to share and collaborate with other human beings. As I noted in my review of Faces, Places, what made Agnes Varda a practically peerless documentarian was her ability to coax her subjects into giving something of themselves, to truly reveal their souls. The people Agnes Varda interviewed, directed and worked with always gave of themselves because Agnes was an open book and because she a pure love and fascination for humanity beamed out of her at all times. It was a vivacious, animating force that coursed like electricity through her films and that invigorated anyone fortunate enough to play some role helping to make them possible. “Nothing is trite,” Varda tells her audience, “if you film it with love and empathy.” Varda was proof that a warm and loving gaze could transform a film from its humblest ingredients into something transcendent, gloriously playful and understatedly wise. For her final Vardian miracle, she has turned that wonderful perspective on a film basic film retrospective TED Talk and, like some enchanted spell, turned this filmed lecture into a magical ode, not to herself, but to the universal joys of creating things, with and for others.

If you want to find a moment in the film that really is Varda By Agnes in miniature it’s probably that cat tomb film. In crafting a video intended to mark the sad passing of a loved one and to act as a remembrance to them, Varda neither cheapens death nor gives into its somberness. Her cat grave installation begins with a stop motion sequence of starfish, one by one, lining around the departed animal’s grave. Then, rings of seashells appear on top of the unassuming mound of earth, and then blooms of fuchsia flowers start materializing in lush bursts (all set to music by legendary minimalist composer Steve Reich). Finally, the camera pulls up from the tiny tomb like a heaven-bound spirit and ascends high into the sky, until we can see that we are on an island in the middle of a peaceful, azure sea. This simple stop motion short, dedicated to a departed cat, ends with a spectacular helicopter shot. This is Agnes Varda, working DIY magic with beach combings, then punctuating it all with something grand and exultant, and making it all feel of a piece. There was no such thing as a small subject and no wrong way to make your film if you put your whole heart into it. Whatever the method, whatever the tools you had at hand, she reminded us that clear-eyed, generous intent will see you through. Hers was a spirit you could feel bobbing playfully and curiously through every frame. And now we have another small, marvelous bauble with a transcendental soulfulness radiating at its center. Close to the end of this film, Varda underlines what an unassuming goodbye this is by referring to it as a “chat”, and indeed it is. Varda was the kind of artist who could engage you in a slight chat and somehow show you the beating heart of the world. Varda By Agnes is a droll conversation that looks upon the enormity of life and death, and renders them both simply and grandly. It’s a sweet and small-scale film by an artist who rarely needed more than a whisper to reach God’s ears.