Agnès

On 20 December, during a 135-minute-long interview on French television, dedicated to topics such as the new law on immigration, the future bill on assisted dying, the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict, Emmanuel Macron was asked about Gérard Depardieu. France’s president could have chosen to be cautious and not comment on a case that has divided France. It would probably have been wiser to have remained silent, but Macron doesn’t do caution; he speaks his mind.“You will never see me taking part in a manhunt,”…

Agnès Varda, at least in her later years, didn’t make a big deal about being taken seriously. For decades, the film-maker and artist was much respected as the pioneering feminist voice in French cinema and as the “godmother of the Nouvelle Vague” – New Wave – her work beating Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut et al to the big screen by several years. But she was also somewhat sidelined, eclipsed by her male peers, and it took until this century for her to be truly revered: last year, her 1962 classic Cléo from 5 to 7 was…

So elegant, so stylish, so extremely and eternally cool. In broad strokes Agnès Varda’s second feature film sounds like a downer: Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand), a singer in Paris, nervously awaits the results of a biopsy. In more specific terms it sounds rather uneventful: unfolding in real-time, Cléo spends her day faffing about – going to a cafe, trying on clothes, hanging out in her apartment with friends, walking the streets, catching cabs. But the sheer delightfulness of Cléo from 5 to 7 comes down to execution,…