"Count the sailors' pom-poms while I'm gone," a woman tells her skittish, panicky friend Cleo in "Cleo from 5 to 7" (1961), hoping to momentarily distract her from her problems with the contemplation of the infinite variety of Parisian street life. Counting the sailors' pom-poms - turning a gimlet eye to the minutiae of daily existence - is a fairly accurate description of the work of "Cleo" director Agnès Varda. Four of her films have been collected in a handsome new boxed set from Criterion.
Varda was a founding member of the French New Wave's offshoot, the Left Bank group of filmmakers, which included Alain Resnais and her husband, Jacques Demy. Her work has been highly praised but comparatively little-seen. "4 x Agnès Varda" (which includes "La Pointe Courte, "Le Bonheur," and "Vagabond," as well as "Cleo" and a host of shorts and extras) may change that state of affairs, serving as a greatest-hits compilation for one of the greatest female filmmakers of the 20th century.
One reason for the failure of Varda's name to come around when lists of preeminent filmmakers are compiled is the retiring nature of her movies, which appear to be less than the sum of their parts. They are purposefully small, framed to fit a single life in their gaze. The untrained eye might classify Varda as a low-key melodramatist - a postgraduate inheritor of the hoary women's-film tradition - but it would be more accurate to call her a pointillist. As in a Georges Seurat painting, each of Varda's dots is infinitesimal; it is only on stepping back that the entirety of the picture comes into focus.
Varda's interest in the mundane dates to her very first film, "La Pointe Courte" (1956). A patient, subtle work about the daily struggles of fishermen, Varda's debut owes a substantial debt to an unexpected source: the Italian neorealists, fascinated by fishermen as potent symbols of the working class. Like Luchino Visconti's "La Terra Trema" or Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Wide Blue Road," "La Pointe Courte" is a collective portrait of a traditional community threatened by modernity. Unlike those filmmakers, Varda is no political agitator. She prefers documenting the small rituals of daily life, borrowing neorealism's careful framing of symbolically freighted imagery and jury-rigging it to a whimsical plot. Little happens in "La Pointe Courte" other than life: Couples squabble and make up, lovers are thwarted and brought together, fish are caught, along with criminals, and every Sunday jousters stand atop moving gondolas and do battle.
"Cleo from 5 to 7," a New Wave landmark and Varda's most beloved film, takes this sense of charmed mundanity and sets it front and center. Taking place in near-real time, "Cleo" follows a ditzy pop chanteuse (Corinne Marchand) for two hours of a single evening as she anxiously awaits the results of a medical exam. Cleo, mercurial and childish, is the physical center of the film, but its heart is elsewhere, diffused among the myriad individuals who briefly flit across the screen. The radio reports on riots in Algeria and museum closings, deaths in battle and Channel crossings via mattress - the minutiae of daily life - and "Cleo from 5 to 7" likewise conjoins the earth-shaking and the ordinary, choosing not to differentiate between the two. Cleo may or may not have cancer, but minute by minute, she is more concerned with the sound of her latest single, or the drift of nearby conversations in the café, than matters of life and death.
Death is never far from Varda's mind. Consumed with thoughts of Algeria and Vietnam, Varda's work makes death a familiar apparition. Even death, though, must take its place in the larger order of events - by which Varda means less a transcendent ideal than a mundane reality. Death is an everyday occurrence - just like eating dinner, or seeing a movie, or changing a diaper. Death rocks "Le Bonheur" (1965) unexpectedly and forcefully, but Varda is too deeply entwined with the everyday to give death the final word; her films are not tragedies, but romantically tinged mysteries.
"Le Bonheur" bears the stamp of Varda's beloved husband, Demy (whose childhood formed the basis of her 1991 film, "Jacquot"), as an effervescent ode to two kinds of love - the weightless bliss of newfound passion, and the simple pleasures of well-worn commitment. "Le Bonheur" ("happiness") is a musical in all but name - a candy-colored ode to romance in which the rules of daily life are momentarily suspended. Francois (Jean-Claude Drouot) successfully juggles wife and girlfriend, believing that "happiness works by addition." Francois and his wife, Therese (Claire Drouot), frolic in the woods with their children, making love and basking in the glories of nature. If this were a Claude Chabrol film, the family would be hacked to death with machetes; if it were a Godard film, Francois' girlfriend, Emilie (Marie-France Boyer), would be a prostitute oppressed by capitalism. Luckily, this is a Varda film, and she maintains the aura of magic, of happiness growing unstoppably greater, far beyond its sell-by date; and when tragedy inevitably intrudes, it is deeply, unshakably mundane.
Varda is a poet of nature, consumed by its fundamental duality. Is nature abundant in its plenitude, or only in its wrath? Nature provides sustenance - witness the fishermen in "Le Pointe Courte," who live off its bounty, or the couple in "Le Bonheur," who receive emotional nourishment from it - but it can also be a cruel mistress. Varda's most recent triumph, the 2000 documentary "The Gleaners and I," studies those who live on nature's leftovers; her 1985 masterpiece, "Vagabond," concentrates with icy intensity on one who dies from its miserliness. Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), a dropout from urban society, trudges across the French countryside during an icy winter, cadging food and shelter from a ragged assortment of fellow fringe cases and pitying bourgeois. "Vagabond" begins with death - a drifter's corpse is found in a field - and proceeds backward from there, documenting this contemporary French stations of the cross. Like "Citizen Kane," "Vagabond" is a postmortem attempt by an unseen interviewer to understand the meaning of a single person's life; but unlike Orson Welles's classic, the object of attention here is no wealthy mogul, but a homeless transient. We emerge from "Vagabond" knowing little more about Mona than when we began, but having gained a wealth of information about the society that allowed her to die in the cold - and that kept her alive for so long.
Now 79, Varda still directs with some regularity, including a 2005 documentary short (included here) in which she interviews the cast and crew of "Cleo." She may have reached the victory-lap phase of her career, returning to past glories and gloating over her successes, but as "4 x Agnès Varda" documents, she has amply earned her plaudits. Life - whether in a fishing village, a big city, or a movie set - is the subject of her unblinking gaze. Some 50 years after her first film, Varda still sees no shortage of sailors' pom-poms to count.
