Recencies van critici

A clear portrait of Varda emerges: as a director who is giving and generous in spirit, as an artist unapologetic about putting her obsessions to film, as a woman who is attentive to the insecurities that other women face because she knows them all too well herself. Varda is staring intently at Birkin to reveal something other filmmakers had struggled to unearth. But the mirror is always there, too.

The film takes the concept of an actor's showcase to postmodern, avant-garde extremes, doing away with narrative in favor of freeform confessions and performances. The opening establishes the freewheeling tone, placing Birkin in a tableau vivant of a 16th-century painting before spoiling the classical mood by having the actress talk about vomiting on set on her 30th birthday.

As director, she interrogates the role of the camera itself, and she seeks to empower the subject of the camera’s gaze. The film addresses its own role in creating this portrait of Jane, revealing the camera lens as a participant. This partnership between director and subject allows for a complicated and humanizing portrayal of an icon that takes on nostalgia, fame, identity and the nature of cinema itself.

Often cloying, these whimsical set pieces—which include Birkin in a noirish art-heist plot and in a riff on Laurel and Hardy—are thankfully followed by more straightforward episodes that feature the performer recapitulating her past. During her reminiscences, Birkin is candid, occasionally self-deprecating, and unfailingly charming, never more so than when she delivers this self-assessment with a mischievous smile: "No exceptional talents but I'm here.

When Varda and Birkin set out to make Jane B. par Agnès V., the director had recently turned sixty, and the actress forty, and both were raising children. Birkin's identity as Gainsbourg's muse had long-expired, and her identity as an independent mother was finally taking over. One can sense Varda's curiosity, admiration and acute understanding of Birkin as she poses questions from behind the camera, and sets up different scenarios in which to place her.

A landmark in feminist cinema, the film is a thoroughly collaborative effort between filmmaker and subject, narratively driven by a conversation between the two that makes plenty of room for tangential flights of fancy as Birkin not only recalls but imagines the many facets of her personal and creative life, putting on different costumes to enact each.

The farthest thing from a straightforward documentary, this companion piece to Ms. Varda's fiction film "Kung-Fu Master," in which Ms. Birkin played the lead role, "Jane B." seems the result of a deep, sympathetic collaboration between director and subject.

Varda’s films ask to be understood as fragments of thought and lived experience, where the cinematic medium enables a deliberate disjunction of time and space, certainly, but in Varda’s realm, life is already this way and capable of being engaged without the strictures of so-called “common sense.” For Varda, sense could never be such.