A documentary on the fashion icon Jane Birkin by a key filmmaker of the French new wave, Agnès Varda.
The actress Jane Birkin worked with the important filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Roger Vadim, was the lover and collaborator of singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, and became a fashion superstar of her era. In the very first shots of her film, Agnès Varda demystifies the pop-cultural image, inviting Jane to look directly into the camera lens and into the eyes of the viewer. She has no need to retell the myth of Jane Birkin and explores her image as the muse of a «great artist» and the public fantasy of her with humor. An iconic image excludes everything that is human, and this is precisely what Agnès Varda focuses on: the everyday and unpolished life of a woman. Her protagonist makes lunch for her daughters and cries while cutting onions, worries about the size of her breasts, and shows the contents of her handbag in the middle of the road as she spills hundreds of papers and cute little nothings in front of the viewer.
Jane B. par Agnès V looks like a tongue-in-cheek collaborative essay by Agnès and Jane. Walking in a garden, the two discuss what the film will be like and whether the viewer might get lost in its editing and the baroque games with mirrors that mix up their faces. As the director explains, the film is a labyrinth. It is composed of fictional scenes, dialogues with Agnès, and Birkin’s recollections of her childhood in England, her tough time at boarding school, her first roles in film, her lovers, and her three daughters Lou, Charlotte, and Kate. The fictional part consists of theatrical scenes, where Jane presents studies for non-existent films and tries out the roles of famous women throughout cultural history: Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Jane, the girlfriend of Tarzan.
The film will be screened in French with Russian subtitles.
Jane B. par Agnès V
Dir. Agnès Varda
France, 1988. 99 min. 16+