The Agnès Varda I Knew: Showing Women Their Real Place in Movies

That year, one of her most critically and commercially successful films, “Vagabond,” about a dangerously unsettled woman, was released in the United States. I distinctly remember being freaked out by “Vagabond,” which opens on the corpse of Mona (a blazing Sandrine Bonnaire), a drifter who freezes to death in a country ditch. Raw, opaque yet also deeply moving, the film tracks her as she wanders from place to place, person to person, alone and finally unknowable. She’s a startlingly uncommon cinematic creation, partly because she is a woman who says no, including to other people.

Varda said she didn’t know why Mona repeatedly said no, a refusal that ends in death. I see “Vagabond,” in part, as a tough, unsentimental exploration about the limits of radical independence for women, which is perhaps what gives it the autobiographical aspect that runs through her movies. Varda’s life and work are filled with contrasts between interiority and exteriority, individuals and their worlds, which makes her house on Rue Daguerre, with its pink facade and striped doors, feel like another auteurist creation.

For the past few years, my friend Joan Dupont and I would have an annual lunch with Varda at her home, eating and talking while periodically visited by one of her cats. She was predictably funny and warm and brilliant, but also sharp and strong and willful. During our lunch last year, Varda said she was tired. But she was as voluble as ever and filled with plans. She reminisced about her mother, who loved art, and her father, who didn’t, and spoke about growing old. “Never complain, never explain,” she said. She asked me about Ava DuVernay. The next week, Varda was off to the Cannes Film Festival, where she presented a restoration of her 1977 film “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t.”

At Cannes, she joined DuVernay and Cate Blanchett on the festival’s red carpet, this time to protest gender inequality at the festival. It was gratifying and deeply moving to see her among all these other women, though I wondered how many understood what Varda â€" through her example, her will and her art â€" had done to pave the way for them. In very concrete ways, in film after film, she helped show women that there was a place for them in movies beyond that of the inevitably beautiful, inevitably young star.

At the end of “The Beaches of Agnès,” Varda asks, “What is cinema?” repeating André Bazin’s essential question. She is standing in one of the witty structures â€" a house of cinema â€" that she had fabricated for her multimedia installations. Cinema is light, images, dark, color, she says, over shots of the edifice with its metal frame and walls of film strips. Soon, she is insi de. “In here, it feels like I live in cinema, cinema is my home,” she says. “I think I’ve always lived in it.” In the last shot, Varda is looking directly at the camera â€" at us â€" framed in an open door that feels like an invitation.