Brunch with Agnès
I’ll begin with yesterday’s lunch: $1 Pizza Pizza pizza (yes, that’s one of the best things about Toronto: a pizza chain called Pizza Pizza – although there’s also a local small chain called Magic Oven Pizza where you can get GOLD as a topping, which is the best takeout pizza in the world), sold in subway stations every Wednesday in fall to raise money for United Way through its Slices for Smiles campaign.
Hot, foldable, cheap and absolutely perfect for a lunch on the run between talking about snacking on seal with Marie-Hélène Cousineau (Before Tomorrow) and catching Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, a fragile and tensile story set in a close-knit French-African community in Paris, anchored by the 35 shots of the title, and bittersweet opening/closing narrative about a rice cooker.
This has been a festival experience of great interviews and almost zero food, so when Unifrance offered me the opportunity to combine a conversation with one of the greatest filmmakers currently working and food at a new French restaurant in Toronto, I jumped at it.
Along with three Canadian journalists I chatted to Agnès about memory, cats and digital technology over patisses. Except all the journos were so rapt, we forgot to eat. Agnès had a butter tart and seemed keen to feed us all up. She said she’d put on 12lb because she’d spent so long editing the new film, which was finished just in time for Venice.
Or was it? “Perhaps the film should lose 20lb,” she said, asking us what we would cut (“Nothing,” being the resounding answer, “the film flows perfectly.” She said she had held pre-screenings and asked the same question, but got totally contradictory answers).
Les Plages d’Agnès is an auto-portrait (inspired by Rembrandt’s example – “He wasn’t a coquette, he wanted to see himself at different ages, that helped me to overcome my shyness”), a personal documentary that also takes in the history of the Nouvelle Vague, Varda’s long career and relationship with Jacques Demy, the changing landscape of Paris and – as previously mentioned – a truly spectacular erection (which I couldn’t, er, get it up to ask about).
But maybe her most gnomic and beautiful utterance would also be my answer: “Chance is my first assistant.”
Like Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, the new film is full of found things – but also, as she told us, “Daydreams – like arriving down the Seine on a sailboat and having a beach in front of my house” that she created, with the assistance of an eight-strong team (who all went to Venice for the premiere) and the Seine police in gun-mounted pontoons.
Croissant or no, it was a nourishing experience with a filmmaker who, as she told Norm Wilner when he said he was a bit intimidated by her legend, “Like you, I am normal.”
Les Plages is to be followed by a series of short documentaries working with the same material – “but with more digressions.”
In a slight digression, Agnès drank tea – Earl Grey – so I achieved my stated ambition of tea with Agnès Varda and can die (or at least eat) happy. Toronto is a coffee-addicted city – the press room is sponsored by Starbucks, so it’s the only free drink on hand – but I’ve discovered some great tea. Yesterday’s caffeine rush was brought to me by a Mocha Oolong from Lettieri, my favourite mini-chain, and White Peony from Urbana Coffee, a fairtrade coffee shop with wireless where I’m writing now. Their lemon poppyseed muffins (aka, today’s lunch) absolutely rock.
To be fair, I had dinner – actual hot food, on a plate, with cutlery and vegetables, with an actual dining companion and conversation – last night before seeing a public screening of Skin in a screen so big that I got vertigo standing at the back of the theatre.
It’s in Toronto’s newest multiplex-in-a-mall, my least favourite kind of cinema, but I have to say that AMC have designed this beautifully: steep rake, comfy seats with full head support, leg room, bag room, good exit lighting, great sound and projection and popcorn that comes in pints.
Skin was a multiplex movie dressed up with arthouse credentials, including a stunning performance from Sophie Okenodo as protagonist Sandra Laing, a South African woman famous for having her status changed from White to Coloured to White, and then changing back to Coloured after she left her parents to marry a Black man, and living into the new South Africa, to become a community mainstay in Johannesburg.
Sandra was there at the screening in a surprise appearance, a dignified and still woman. She had the best line of the night, in response to the best question: the woman next to me asked, “After all that intrusive press when you were a kid and again as an adult, why did you agree to make this film?” After a pause, Sandra replied into a breathless silence from the audience and to rapturous applause: “The story has to be told, so that not one person has to go through what I went through.” It’s a story that’s worth telling – and seeing – almost whatever the form, and the direction gets more confident as the film goes on. Director Anthony Fabian said he believes that fiction film can effect more political change than any other form in the contemporary world – it’s a passionate film whose strength is in its clarity and narrative – heavy symbolism not needed.
And I’m just about off to interview a director who’s mastered that lesson to an extent so sublime it’s ridiculous: Albert Serra, who shone where Gilliam failed with a witty, earthy Don Quixote adaptation. His new film, El Cant dels Ocells, its title taken from a Catalan folk song, is as spare as you can get: a black-and-white, almost dialogueless film following the three Kings as they journey through mountains and desert to reach Mary and Joseph, it’s a film you want to savour. The blacks are the inky blacks of Goya paintings, its landscapes epic without ever being boastful, and its summary of the religious message – look, and you will see wonders – a brilliant manifesto for cinema.
Am I intimidated? Totally.
