Daguerreotypes (1975)

Not rated, but almost as innocent as a movie can get.  There's one thing in the movie that could cause someone to look away.  One of the recurring images is that the subjects of the documentary are watching a magic show.  One of the magic tricks / gags is that the magician puts a knife through his arm, causing it to bleed.  But he even warns you that it is not for the squeamish, coupled with the fact that this is clearly a trick.  Besides that, nothing I can think of.

DIRECTOR: Agnes Varda

I've been trying to find the time to write this all morning.  Hazel is having another "Hold me, I'm a baby" day.  I might have a few minutes to knock out a couple of sentences, but we'll see.  Her nap is in the next twenty minutes and I might get ten to do something with this.  I'm in the weird place, blog-wise, where I have too many massive Blu-Ray collections and I'm trying to do all of them.  That's a great place to be, by the way.  I'd rather be in this pickle than the alternative and having to scrounge the bottom of the barrel looking for movies.  But with all of these box sets, I realize that it's been kind of a minute since I've really broken down an Agnes Varda movie.

I think it will always be true that I'll prefer a traditional fictional narrative from Varda than watching her documentary work.  But I also have to say that I'm more familiar with her later documentaries than I am her earlier documentaries.  Daguerreotypes might actually hit a sweet spot with me because this is Varda at her most pure.  Varda is someone who just loves having a camera.  When she overthinks things, I feel like it comes out like an imitation of Varda rather than something truly authentic.  Again, the gall on me to even question one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.  But Daguerreotypes feels incredibly authentic.  Varda (I think it's Varda!) narrates the movie sparingly, which I really appreciate.  But in that narration, she's almost diary style, discussing why she's making this movie.  She loves this street.  She loves the vendors who live on her street, so she made a documentary showing what it must be like to live in their shoes for about an hour.  Using mostly cinema verite methods (with Varda's obsession will mildly scripting moments), we kind of get an understanding of why Varda is so moved by the people who surround her geographically.

There's a bunch of clever things she does in this movie.  Remember how I just told you that she gets out of her head in this one.  I kind of still stand by that idea, but I feel like some of the real genius moments in this documentary probably happened in post.  I can't deny that the introduction of a magician had to be somewhere in the planning stages for the movie. But also, the takeaways from the magician sequences had to be just a moment of joy for Varda to find with her direction.   The magician, in this movie, does a bunch of stuff for the film.  One of Varda's themes in the film is the necessity for both practical manual labor and the joy that art brings.  The movie has a lot of themes.  That was one of them.  Don't fight me on this.  But she does so by having the working class people watch this magician.  I've mentioned this sentence ago.  I'll try to keep up too.  (Note:  There was a break there where I had to put the baby down for a nap and then the day got away from me.  I told you this would happen.) It's this moment that me as the audience sees these folks having a good time, but ultimately looking at this buffoon put on an illusion act.  It's in these moments that we have to have people who want to have a good time.  Thank goodness that's the way that the room went, but it almost didn't have to.  Watching these people have incredibly repetitive lives that is backbreaking, how can they contend with the notion that someone is going to sell them on fantasy?

And that's where Varda really sells me.  She has been microdosing me a theme for the majority of the movie.  I watch these people who are happy enough, but doing the same thing on repeat and she straight up asks these folks if they dream.  Some of the business owners respond very literally, talking about the process of sleep and repetitive dreams that they may have.  The clock owner, appropriately enough, talks about repairing dreams and that the same dream --pun intended! --comes to him like clockwork.  But there are others who get the double-meaning of dream.  While few people feel outright oppressed by their chosen professions, they still think about the path not taken. It's a little heartbreaking, if only because we're all dealing with a variation of that.  Varda herself has a modicum of celebrity by this point in her career.  Heck, I could mention the name "Agnes Varda" to a room full of people that I regularly talk with and I'd probably be the only person not only knows about her, but has a strong opinion about her work.  But Varda kind of becomes the distant observer who is part of the story.  One of the things about Varda is that she's one of these directors who embraces her humanity through her work.  She's always in a state of self-discovery.  That self-discovery comes with a little bit of a character that she puts on, but she's woven into this narrative.  Her asking these people if they dream is both a moment of common bonding and also, subconsciously, an affirmation of her own choices.  She is the one who is always doing what she wants to do, regardless of what is expected of her.  There is little repetition in her life because she's always pursuing the next thing.  As much as I criticize her later work, it's probably healthy that not all of her movies slap.  That means that she's not just doing the thing that she knows works.

Can we talk about the sub-documentary in this movie?  I'm talking about the perfumery owners.  There's a joy to all of the subjects of the documentary.  They're so happy to have a little bit of spotlight on their small lives that they're smiling and desperately not trying to look at the camera, with the exception of the talking heads portions. But the perfumery owners?  He's an incredibly old man who is happy to be there and seemingly loves his wife and his wife?  She has some degree of dementia.  She looks so sad and so lost and of course she exists in that space all the live long day.  It's a place that has existed longer than the other places.  It relies on almost no outside commercial involvement.  The bottles of perfume are found bottles with handwritten labels and this poor woman just seems like one of forgotten bottles that they sell.  It's incredibly emotional and Varda seems so sympathetic towards this woman.  Good!  We all have souls.

Listen.  I'm not sure why I like this movie.  I kind of spelled it out, but I admit that another day, I might have hated it.  While it will never be one of my favorite Varda films, it's incredibly peaceful and --even more importantly --incredibly personal.  I love myself some vulnerability and this movie is vulnerable.