When a biography covers a very busy 90-year life in a mere 224 pages, it probably can't be thought of as definitive. But Carrie Rickey still managed to write a biography that feels neither rushed nor incomplete, and most of all is incredibly engaging as it covers both Varda's life and her work. I'm a bit of a Varda fan (Vagabond is among my favorite films), but if you're not this book should be enjoyable anyway (as evidenced by other early reader reviews), and it will likely encourage you to delve into the Varda film catalog. I know I want to dig deeper after reading this book.

A worthwhile read, and one of the most important film books of 2024.

Thanks to netgalley and WW. Norton and Company for providing an egalley for early review.

Full review will be live August 12, 2024.

In A Complicated Passion, longtime film critic Carrie Rickey simply follows Varda’s life from cradle to grave. She begins with the artist’s parents and her early life in Sète, where she formed her attachment to the waterfront. “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches,” Varda said in her 2008 film The Beaches of Agnès. She would return to this location make her first movie, La Pointe Courte in 1955, at the age of twenty-five, despite having seen only a handful of movies herself. By the time she reached her early thirties, Varda was already being called the godmother of the New Wave, though she was barely a decade older than Godard, Truffaut, and the other “Cahiers boys.” While they were intensely studying and critiquing films for Cahiers du Cinéma, Varda was on location making movies.

Rickey discusses Varda’s early romantic relationship with ceramicist and longtime friend Valentine Schlegel briefly and matter-of-factly. Valentine was openly lesbian, and the women shared Varda’s home and studio on rue Daguerre for six years. Varda’s daughter, Rosalie, confirmed the relationship after her mother’s death. Varda herself seemed to regard her sexuality as a private matter hardly worth mentioning rather than a secret, and Rickey navigates this preference with tact.

In the 1960s, Varda was a young single mother who took on projects with the infant Rosalie and a nanny in tow. She saw no reason for motherhood to curtail her vision, and she made a point of hiring and training other women in a variety of roles on her sets throughout her life. Her work was always in support of women, and she was outspoken and political with that support. She even protested for the right to abortion in France while visibly pregnant with her son Mathieu in the early 1970s.

Eventually Varda married fellow director Jacques Demy, best known in the States for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Their working lives were as intertwined as their private life with two young children, and they bolstered each other’s projects in whatever manner was required, from finding financing to technical help to child care. But they did not collaborate on projects, instead maintaining their singular cinematic visions.

As Varda’s life became more complicated—Demy fell in love with a man in California, and she became a (mostly) single parent with a supportive community—Rickey, like Varda, remains focused on the work. Each film and short gets its due, from inspiration to funding to release and critical reception. Rickey also provides context for Varda’s work, not only by referencing the work of the New Wave auteurs who followed in her wake but by bringing other pioneering women of cinema to the reader’s attention. One early artist, Alice Guy-Blaché, is credited with at least 1,000 films before her death in 1968; only 150 of her films have been able to be identified over the past century. Rickey also makes sure to mark progress in the industry, however incremental, by noting the growing percentage of movies directed by women, especially in the twenty-first century.

The book comes in at under 300 pages, which is not a lot for a life as long as Varda’s; she died in her early nineties. It’s organized by Varda’s major artistic eras: Still covers her early work as a photographer; Moving describes her decades as a filmmaker; and Dimension details the coda of Varda’s life as an installation artist. It’s during this time that she takes her victory lap to receive several lifetime achievement awards and to lead the Women’s March at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.

The narrative moves along at a clip rather than bogging down in the details, which is usually welcome. A few times, I was left a bit adrift and would have like just a few more words. For instance, Rickey mentions late in the book that Varda was at last able to find a negative of Umbrellas of Cherbourg and have it restored. In the late 1980s, Varda and Demy had scoured everywhere they could think of to find negatives of their early work, including flea markets and film labs; where did one eventually turn up?

Readers who have never watched a Varda movie will want to start with the work, not the life. Rickey provides sketches of plots for each work discussed, but she does assume a level of familiarity on the part of the reader, which is fair. Reading a biography of a filmmaker without having seen the films reminds me of the old saw about how writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Throughout the book, Varda comes up against the question all creatives have to ask: Is it possible to pursue an artistic career and support yourself and your family? Varda had both the creative vision and the brain for business required to make it all happen, and to happen over seven decades of her life. She knew how to plan, and she knew how to take advantage of a serendipitous moment—especially if it involved a cat.