Okay, so I watched this documentary on Blu-ray, where it was the first disc in the Criterion The Complete Films of Agnès Varda set.

The fact that it’s on the first disc isn’t a coincidence, either. Because Criterion isn’t just doing a “here’s a chronological dump of all this person’s movies, bam,” they’re arranging them in a kind of thematically programmed way — one review I read said it was like your own personal Agnès Varda film festival. And so this film is the last film Varda made, but also a kind of first-person overview of her career and her motivation and her themes and what-not, and so it makes a good intro to the set.

It works well in that context, but taken on its own, it seems a bit slight. Varda is a fascinating subject, and getting her first-person thoughts about her art is great, but beyond that, this is mostly either shots of her sitting on a stage and talking to audiences, clips of her movies showing as she talks about them, or pictures and videos of her photographs or art installations. (Yes, photographs and art installations: Varda is one of those creative people who didn’t ever stick to one medium, having started as a photographer before becoming a moviemaker, and then late in life doing these kind of cool multimedia art installations.)

Given the timing of this release — it was like a month after her death in 2019 — there’s some poignancy to the ending, where Varda fades away into the wind and mist on a beach, and I suspect that audiences who saw it on release saw it as a kind of eulogy, and it hit a bit harder; but seeing it today, it’s mostly just a fairly straightforward no frills documentary, made interesting only by the intrinsic interestingness of the subject.

The disc also included a little short film, Les 3 Boutons. This was apparently commissioned by some fashion house (which I guess the tie-in is: there’s a dress in this?), and you can actually view it on Youtube. It’s a little fairy tale that has some striking visuals — Varda’s compositions make it really clear that she was a photographer before she got into movies.

Also, I do want to say a little something here about this set, which is amazing. Not only does it have all of Varda’s films — features, documentaries, shorts, the whole works, many of them newly restored and better-looking and -sounding than ever — but it also contains a thick book with essays about her, and thematic essays about each of the 15 discs. It’s like the perfect demonstration of what physical media can be.

(But also, every one of those movies is on the Criterion Channel, and if they don’t look quite as good, they also don’t look terrible, and they’re basically free to watch there, so that also points to the real merits of streaming video.)