For the last twenty years of both her professional and personal life, Agnès Varda made films that saw her reflect on her career and all of her experiences as a filmmaker and as a person in a radically shifting world – it seemed like she was always on the verge of saying farewell to her career, because so much of her later life was occupied by ruminations and retrospectives. Her recent passing motivated me to watch one of her films that I had yet to see (how better to celebrate a fallen artist than to embrace some of their work?), because while I admire few artists as much as I did Varda, there were certain films made by her that I had yet to see, mainly due to her extensive, vast artistic output and the sometimes rare availability of her work. No film seemed more poised to satisfy this desire than her very first, La Pointe Courte. A delightful, meaningful and fascinating realist portrait that proves the effectiveness of brevity (running at just over an hour), and the power of memory. It is not the film that would define her career, nor is it her best film – it is often just cited as her very first, usually when mentioning how she predated her male contemporaries in the French New Wave with this film. However, it is one of her more complex works, a quiet and reflective journey into a French coastal town filled with a wide range of people, with Varda weaving together various stories into this poignant and beautiful modernist tapestry that may not make any bold statements individually, but when taken together, and the bigger picture is considered, La Pointe Courte is a meaningful snapshot of a particular moment in a particular place, and it certainly is as memorable as it is meaningful.

It is difficult to describe precisely what La Pointe Courte is about because it has several narratives sewn into it. Essentially, it is a film set in a small area of the coastal area of Sète, in a small fishing village known as La Pointe Courte. Throughout the film, there are various stories told, overlapping with each other, and having neither a beginning nor an end. Two lovers arrive in the village from Paris, with the wife intending to ask for a divorce from her husband, not because of anything he has done personally, but because she just does not believe in love anymore. A hazardous bacteria has entered into the local lagoon, with fisherman being forbidden from harvesting livestock from that particular area, yet many of them still do it, most of them narrowly avoiding arrest by the local police. A young boy named Daniel has tragically died, and his family mourn him, but not with the intensity one would expect from those who have just lost a loved one, but rather with the muted melancholy of a group that knows this is a common occurrence, and they are just unfortunate to have been victim to it. A young woman, at the age of only sixteen, intends to elope with her boyfriend, with the family being vehemently against it, as their daughter being far too young and inexperienced to ever enter into a responsible marriage at such an age. Such is life in La Pointe Courte, it would seem.

These stories and others are all the core of La Pointe Courte. Varda had many merits as a filmmaker, but perhaps one of her most valuable was her ability to craft unique and subversive films that were highly-original and singular in their vision, but also ones that are profoundly human. With La Pointe Courte, her impressive debut, the director composes a short but impactful work about a small village and tells various stories in an innovative way. This could have very easily been an anthology film – different episodic moments define this film, so it would only be logical that these stories would each be present singularly, on their own in order to make full use of their potential. Varda was never one to play by the rules, so her version of an anthology film is one that defies the very core of the concept, and rather focuses on breaking these moments into smaller moments, peppering them throughout the film and watching them flourish, both as individual works, but also more effectively when combined with the stories surrounding them. La Pointe Courte is set over roughly a day or two, and thus the way Varda tells these stories emulates an ordinary day in the village – various moments, woven together to portray the eventful daily life of a small village.

The key to the success of La Pointe Courte is that it is about a quaint village that would not have otherwise been known at all had Varda not made a film centred around the daily activities of its inhabitants. Yet, there is absolutely nothing special about La Pointe Courte, other than its rugged charm, but Varda still crafts a magical representation fo the village, showing it through an almost surreal light, placing its eccentricities at the forefront and blending them with a powerful story, creating a complex rural odyssey that may be small in execution, but enormous in themes and intentions. Varda also effectively makes use of non-professional actors to play most of the roles, and with the exception of two (Phillipe Noiret and Silvia Monfort), all the roles were played by local residents, none of which had any acting experience. The use of amateur actors is a filmmaking tactic that was often used in neo-realist works, and while risky, when done correctly, the results are astonishing. In La Pointe Courte, it brings a certain elegant realism, a natural sense of honesty and simplicity that helps create the illusion that this is an almost voyeuristic journey into the daily life of a small seaside village. It has a naturality that would have been entirely loss had professional actors occupied all of these major roles – and surprisingly, the weakest performances come not from the amateurs, but from the trained performers, who are certainly good, but far less compelling than the eccentric, colorful locals who lend a heartful beauty to this wonderful and captivating film.

Varda didn’t only make a tremendously moving film, but also one that speaks to some deeper meaning. There is a great deal that is conveyed in this film’s curt 76-minute running time. One element of Varda’s career that seemed to be quite common is that regardless of whether she was working in narrative or non-fiction filmmaking, she had a strange relationship with reality – every one of her fictional films has some element of truth in it, and her documentaries often veer off into the realm of the heightened, even if only momentarily. La Pointe Courte is the director musing on the boundaries between reality and fiction, with this film being quite unique insofar as it is a fictional film about, and starring, real people. Noiret and Monfort are of course exceptions, but everyone else is playing what we assume to be themselves, so there is no way to know precisely what is truth and what is fiction – and Varda, to her credit, never dares to sensationalize or meander unnecessarily. She presents everything directly and explicitly, mainly because another central theme is that of memory – the impetus for the making of La Pointe Courte was that of returning to a small village for the sake of memory, with Varda being sent there to take pictures for a friend who could not return. This excursion turned into a filmmaking opportunity, and while there are certainly some scenes that are put together specifically for this film, there are others that exist purely to be part of a moving photograph of La Pointe Courte, a way of recording a moment in time. La Pointe Courte has changed – not by much, but it has moved along with the times, as all cities and villages tend to. Yet, through the lens of Varda’s camera in 1955, it becomes timeless, its quaint beauty etched permanently into the artistic zeitgeist, a portrayal of a small and pure seaside town that is not particularly unique, but so intensely compelling because of the way ordinary life is portrayed as undeniably gorgeous.

We could dare to call La Pointe Courte the link between Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave, as it features the raw honesty and socially-mediated intensity of the former, and the meditative poignancy of the latter, and when we go beyond the limits of what this film is saying, and begin to question how it says it, we can see how pivotal this was as a moment in film history. Varda’s status as a pioneer, not only of female-led cinema, but of entire film movements is quite extraordinary, and to have innovated both narrative and non-fiction filmmaking in a single career, and doing it with such effortless ease, is testament to the fact that Varda was perhaps the greatest to ever work in the medium. Contentious for sure, but certainly not without basis – and La Pointe Courte is the perfect exemplification of all that would go on to define Varda as one of the true maestros of cinema – it is unassuming, humble and honest filmmaking. It looks at the boundaries between fact and fiction and remains both extremely personal, and incredibly moving to any viewer. It is very often more focused on portraying the beauty of a moment rather than telling a particular story, but when everything is put together, we come away with a captivating and endearing piece of docu-fiction that launched not only Varda’s career, but the careers of countless other artists that would follow in her footsteps, whether intentionally or not. With La Pointe Courte, Varda blazed a trail of narrative filmmaking, and while her later work may remain her best, we can’t dismiss the undeniable importance of a film like La Pointe Courte, a film too gorgeous and meaningful for its own good.