Documenteur (1981)

Not rated, but goodness gracious, the sheer glut of gratuitous nudity is staggering!  Every time you get comfortable with the narrative of a young woman taking care of her son, Varda reminds her audience that this is a woman who has sexual needs.  But these moments linger.  And linger.  And linger.  For a movie that runs just over an hour, a sizable percentage of the movie is lingering on nudity and sex.

DIRECTOR:  Agnes Varda

I don't know what it is about my life that I can't find time to write as much as I want to anymore.  (I just had the epiphany that this film also deals with that confrontation and now I want to just talk about this.)  I also am kind of mad at myself for not picking more accessible movies.  Sure, I know I just wrote about My Cousin Vinny, but I feel like I've been mostly avoiding new movies and some more schlocky stuff in an attempt to whittle away at my owned movies.  Still, I'm glad to say that I've finished the "In California" disc of my Agnes Varda box set.

This is the honest to goodness truth:  I don't think I've ever seen a movie that has given me so much of a love/hate reaction.  Part of it is Varda; part of it is me.  I vascillated pretty hard on this one.  The first day I watched this, I questioned, "What is this avant-garde nonsense?"  It was a lot of philosophy over documentary images like we saw with Mur Murs.  I really liked Mur Murs and what I liked about Mur Murs is not what happens with Documenteur.  Even though the opening shot of the movie is one of the final shots of Mur Murs, the two --tonally --are worlds apart.  Mur Murs's genius lied in its effortlessness.  It is an organic tale of the cultural landscape of Los Angeles.  It's gorgeous.   It's art speaks for itself.  The artists are vulnerable and emotional.  It's perfect.  Documenteur keeps changing its philosophy from, vascillating between avant-garde and documentary.  It's not insane that an artist or a director uses documentary footage in an avant-garde film.  I mean, that's what is going on with Koyaanisqatsi and that film is as avant-garde as it gets.  But I find Varda often insufferable when she completely embraces the avant-garde.  She's such a talented narrative storyteller and she makes compelling documentaries.  But her avant-garde stuff, unlike her documentaries, seem strained with effort.  With the case of Documenteur, it's her combination of almost poetic verse coupled with the long shot of nudity.

I am feeling a little bit awkward writing about the nudity.  Remember how I said that much of my dislike for this movie comes from my hangups?  Yeah, this is that hangup on display.  One of the motifs of Documenteur is acknowledging that Emilie is balancing her role as a mother against her role as a woman.  As someone who finds herself raising a child by herself, she ignores elements of self, which include her sexual desires.  I don't want this stuff cut from the movie.  The problem with Varda's take on this is that she goes all in on this element of self.  And I don't think it is because Varda believes that woman is entirely defined by sexual desire.  If I voiced that to the late Varda, she would probably be mortified.  (Mind you, in that scenario, Varda would still be alive and would be able to respond.)  But Varda uses sexual need to represent everything that isn't motherhood to Emilie.  It becomes a shorthand that loses its value very early on.  Like, it comes across as somewhat lazy.  For example, one of the more damning moments in the movie is towards the end, when Emilie leaves Martin at home as she lies in a bed nude, staring out the window.  I get this moment.  But it's the nude element of this scene that dilutes the meaning of what is really happening here.  Varda, in an attempt to be the artist she always fights for, places actress Sabine Mamou in the nude as a sign of freedom. But the nudity cannot be divorced from the notion of sexuality.  If you stuck Mamou in the same scene completely dressed, the scene becomes one of anxiety coulped with avoidance.  Instead, there's an element of horniness that almost comes across as unsympathetic versus relatable.

But I stressed that this is the most love/hate movie I've seen.  When Varda forgets that she's a fancypants director who makes stuff that plays in museums, the simple narrative is good.  With such a short runtime, I feel like Varda feels the need to justify what seems like almost a lack of plot.  Instead, she's cutting away from an incredibly poignant story of a woman trying to start her life over with her son.  Yes, it is a simple story.  But I also think that is Varda's sweet spot.  Varda absolutely nails simple, psychological tales of real world problems.  Cleo from 5 to 7 has a similarly simple plot.  That story is about waiting for test results.  Both of these are universal ideas that build suspense on telling us on whether the world is a fair place or not.  Sure, Varda does a good job stressing that Emilie has needs other than motherhood or surviving poverty.  But there is more to being a human than simply daydreaming of sex so she can get away from her kid.  Varda builds a small world in a small apartment and talks about how she is separated from everything in her life that made sense.  She is separated from her husband.  She is separated from her lover.  She's even separated from her employment and her language and nothing makes sense.  That's a story.  And when we get those moments, I'm capitvated by it.

Part of it comes from the experience of being a father. Martin is appropriately needy.  Varda's direction of this kid is brilliant because Martin is almost on the periphery of his own life.  He knows that his sense of normalcy is gone.  He understands that he can't be in his old home, but he doesn't fully absorb why he isn't in his old home.  He is obsessed with his mother because she represents stability.  And yet, as much as Emilie needs Martin, she also needs time when she's not Emilie the mom.  It's heartbreaking, watching Martin beg for things that he deems reasonable while Emilie is tempted by the border she sets for her child.  The fact that Martin has to sleep alone in his own room is appropriate.  But her disappearance only happens because she has a modicum of freedom from her son.  We see moments where she views Martin as a lead weight around her neck.  And it hurts.  The kid's pain is real and it doesn't need a lot of hoity-toity artistry to explain it.  No.  He just begs his mom to stay and play with him and that's what makes sense.  

The reason that I bought the Varda box set is because I love when Varda is firing on all cylinders, she is one of the best of all times.  But when she's conscious of what she is doing, standing in the shadow of her own greatness, it feels almost like mimickry of what she has done naturally.  Documenteur is more successful than not.  But I also can't ignore that there's a lot of "trying too hard" Varda in this one.  The story works.  I'm not even saying that she shouldn't challenge the text on this one.  I'm saying that not everything has to be a museum piece.  Don't pull away from what makes the important parts poignant.