This “portrait-fiction” is a playful, very inventive, and colourful film about actress and singer Jane Birkin by Agnès Varda. Vibrating with ideas and showing the joy of creating an experimental portrait, it involves many fictional scenes and “tableaux vivants”, where Birkin is the focus of numerous sensual and amusing compositions. A game and flirt between Varda, her camera, and the actress, who wishes to be an “anonymous celebrity“. We discover Jane Birkin in all her forms, in a variety of diverse states and seasons: Jane… d’Arc, Calamity Jane, the Jane of Tarzan and the Jane of Gainsbourg. |
|
She changes roles and disguises to amuse herself with Varda, who is proposing fictions, or homages, to her, such as Marilyn Monroe or Laurel, the clumsy one from Laurel et Hardy. The film is a portrait that knits together a series of mini-fictions, threaded by Jane B.’s mini-confidences that arise from the free dialogue with the one who films her, Agnès V.
With Philippe Léotard, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Serge Gainsbourg, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Farid Chopel and many others. |
|
Jane B. by Agnès V.
France 1988, 97min. 35mm
French. Subtitles: Dutch
Crew
Screenplay: Agnès Varda Cinematography: Nurit Aviv, Pierre-Laurent Chénieux
Sound: Jean-Paul Mugel, Olivier Schwob
Editing: Marie-Josée Audiard, Agnès Varda
Production: Agnès Varda for Ciné Tamaris
Director
Varda was born Arlette Varda 1928 in Brussels, Belgium. She studied Art History at the Ecole du Louvre and worked as a photographer before moving into film. Despite similarities to the French New Wave, films by Varda belonged more precisely to the Rive Gauche movement, along with Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras a.o. Agnès Varda was married to film director Jacques Demy from 1962 until his death in 1990. |