Rating: 4/5
Desire has a thousand forms, a thousand ruses, a thousand lies. Desire is an island lost at sea. — Agnès Varda
Julien, a 14-year-old boy, walks down the street in a gi, walking like a side-scrolling video game character, throwing punches and kicks. He is recreating the moves from his favorite arcade game, Kung Fu Master. The objective is to fight through the floors of a pagoda to rescue the damsel in distress.
Lucy, also a teenager, throws a party in the backyard. Lucy’s mother, Mary-Jane, watches from the balcony, checking on Lucy’s sick younger sister, Lou. Mary-Jane finds Julien in the bathroom, sitting on the floor drunk. She shows him a trick to induce vomiting. As the kids are leaving, Julian watches Mary-Jane sing to Lou. She tells Julien to go home. Lucy tells Mary-Jane a joke that Julien told her. Mary-Jane reflects on Julien’s eyes as he watches her sing. How pathetic, yet how wonderful.
Mary-Jane drives to Lucy’s school to see if she can run into Julian. Instead, she accidentally taps him with her car. Mary-Jane sees his hand is scuffed, so she offers to take him to a café. She buys him a Coke and gives him 5 francs to play Kung Fu Master. Mary-Jane watches him play and explain the game, inching closer to him.
Back home, the quietness of domestic life feels lonely. Mary-Jane thinks of seeing Julien again. She tells Lucy about being her age and loving a man 20 years her senior, unable to touch him, but talking and talking. Looking back, she wasn’t that into him, just flattered that he was so into her.
The movie follows Mary-Jane as she looks for opportunities to see Julien again and Julien, her.
I'm tired of being sick, of being here, of being 14.
In 1971, Serge Gainsbourg released a concept album called Histoire de Melody Nelson, describing a romance between the middle-aged narrator and a 14-year-old girl, portrayed on the album and the cover art by Jane Birkin, who was Gainsbourg’s partner at the time and 20 years his junior.
While filming Jane B. par Agnès V., Jane Birken presented Agnès Varda with a story she wanted to tell about an older woman falling in love with a teenage boy, or the teenage boy falling in love with her. They stopped filming Jane B., Varda wrote the script, and they filmed Kung-Fu Master before resuming Jane B. Varda chose her son Mathieu to play the teenage boy. Jacques Demy, Mathieu’s father, was hesitant until Jane brought her daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, onto the project.
I don't know the words in English for the filthy things you've done.
As a product of the 80s, AIDs is on everyone’s minds. Condom dispensers sit next to Out Run, and condom samples line men’s magazines. “A-I-D-S: Ass-Injected Death Sentence!” “Why don’t Belgians squeeze lemons? They’re afraid of getting lemonAIDS.” A skit from A Bit of Fry & Laurie where they’re on a talk show called AIDS talk, in which the doctor tells the person they have AIDs. “Are you ready to die for love?”
A pivotal moment in this movie is when Julien explains Dungeons & Dragons to Mary-Jane. That it’s all in your imagination—that it’s all determined by the dice.
Loneliness finds fixations. Limerance is its favorite pastime. But people have feelings and their own fixations. It’s easier to long for what you can’t have: an ex, a memory, an expensive trip. People who have a partner, the family, the vacations love to tell you that love will find you when you least expect it. Or urge you to have fun on their behalf because you’re single and they aren’t. It’s all projections of desire.
I haven’t seen much Varda, but one consistency in her work is my inability to describe the plot. It’s a setup or pretense, and the characters follow it through—choice and consequence.