The Beaches Of Agnes

The act of cinematic self-portrait can run the risk of self-indulgence, as well as redundancy. That goes double for anyone whose work is as distinctive and expressive as that of Agnes Varda, the only significant female director to emerge from the French New Wave, and arguably the most important female director to come out of post-World War II Europe -- and she's still going strong in 2009. It's not as though her films haven't said a great deal about who she is across a half-century; to one degree or another, she's been creating a self-portrait since the 1950s. But The Beaches of Agnes manages not only to distill down what the filmmaker herself regards as most ...