Photographs come alive through reenactments. By the sea, she and her crew make an installation of mirrors - in frames, on easels, buried under the sand. They’re an obvious symbol of reflection, but they create dazzling images, too. Dressed in variations on the magenta sundress that usually matches the pageboy haircut she’s worn for decades, Varda recalls her childhood, her adulthood, her politics, and how both her films and her two children were born. She doesn’t just show us, she takes us inside of it all, inside of her. It’s a reverie.
The line that cordons off events from each other has been gleefully erased so that the clips from her films - “La Pointe Courte,’’ “Vagabond,’’ “The Gleaners and I,’’ to name a few - feel indistinguishable from everything else. It’s all a movie to Varda. Actually, it’s an active combination of diorama and film: an emotional version of cinerama, in which movies are everywhere and everything.
But the movie that reconstitutes these living memories is all the more remarkable for the candor of the woman behind it. Lounging in the ornately decorated belly of a giant prop whale built on the sand, Varda says that as a young woman she needed to find that special man to whom she could give her virginity. She mentions marching for women’s rights, and there’s a montage of various demonstrations that fits elegantly alongside images from 1985’s “Vagabond,’’ her masterpiece about a young woman who refused to conform to any idea of a fixed life.
Varda allows herself to be interviewed by her friend and fellow great director Chris Marker, a notoriously camera-shy fellow. Here he’s represented as a cartoon cutout of the cat which his own recent movies have been fixated. He speaks in the sort of digitally distorted voice that certain witnesses require when talking to “60 Minutes.’’
