Classiq - An online journal that celebrates cinema, culture, style and storytelling.

5 September 2026

Read instead…in print #44: Sydney Pollack Collected Interviews

Throughout the years, Three Days of the Condor has become one of my favourite films, a film that works within the thriller genre, but what distances it from tradition is something personal, and the fact that it is deeply rooted in its characters, and Redford, of course. Because Robert Redford in this film, and in all of Sydney Pollack’s films, is the kind of actor I am always drawn to, the kind of actor that doesn’t attract the attention by flashy outbursts or extravagant performances, but by the language, and refinement, of less, by what he doesn’t do, by what he doesn’t say, by how subtle he is, by the mystery he retains in every scene, by how truthful he is in every scene. “Actors often feel they have to do a little acting here and there. The fact is there are very few who have the confidence to trust the audience and just be,” Pollack said of Redford. It’s the kind of performance that gives a film longevity. It was something in Redford that came naturally in every performance, even much more so in Pollack’s films, because he was a director who cared about people and whose films are ingrained in the performances, but which didn’t rely heavily on words – “It’s only because of our own lack of imagination that we rely so strongly on words anyway”.

Sydney Pollack was one of cinema’s true visual storytellers, and in every story you feel he was an actor’s director, a humanist, but also that he was a craftsman. He had a vision and stayed with it, and that is a story of becoming, fully and truthfully. The book Sydney Pollack: Collected Interviews, edited by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Cronin, is revelatory in another way as well, as it shows how invested and apt the filmmaker was in every single aspect of his movies, from screenplay to musical score, from lighting to editing. His films make you curious, make you see differently, catch you off guard (as he liked to catch his actors off guard), his characters make you see the complexity of human beings, those shades of grey that raise questions and make you think, they make you step into different worlds. “I am very suspicious of ‘knowing’. It is almost impossible to know anything.” And as he goes through all the steps of making a film in these interviews, he makes you a contributor to his vision. It’s hard to resist it. You become closer to what cinema is about.

Read instead… in print is about a good book about cinema or filmmakers. No discursive, pretentious analyses, no verbose scrutiny. Because the idea is to invite you to read the book, not read about it here. But instead of using social media, I use my journal. Back to basics. Take it as a wish to break free of over-reliance on social media (even if it’s just for posting a photo of a good book) for presenting my work, cultural finds and interests. These are things to be enjoyed as stand-alone pieces in a more substantial and meaningful way than showing them in the black hole of Instagram thronged with an audience with a short attention span. This is also a look through my voluminous collection of books about film that I use as research in my adamant decision to rely less and less on the online and more on more on print materials.

MORE STORIES

A look for the ages and my annual reiteration of “Three Days of the Condor”

Read instead…in print #21: J’ai connu une belle époque

Image-making and voyeurism: Faye Dunaway in “Eyes of Laura Mars”

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23 August 2026

August Newsletter: Seven Samurai, Gimme Shelter and a new Persona

Photos: Classiq Journal

“There is nothing that says more about its creator
than the work itself.”

Akira Kurosawa (Something Like an Autobiography)

Viewing

Seven Samurai, 1954
Akira Kurosawa

This will always be the summer when my son watched Seven Samurai for the very first time. Every time I watch it, the stakes are risen that much higher. The words of the great and much regretted Tony Stella, from our interview are forever etched in my memory: “After seeing Seven Samurai at age six, there was no turning back – everything got measured by that yardstick.” Since Tony’s passing in May, there hasn’t been one single film that I have watched when I haven’t thought of Tony, so many of his artworks strengthening the bond with so many of my favourite movies, and his impact on film culture.

One-Eyed Jacks, 1961
Marlon Brando

The only film that Brando directed did not turn out the way Marlon intended. “I thought Marlon was a terrific director. I trusted his eyes,” Karl Malden, his co-star said. “He knew exactly how to frame a shot pictorially. He was always surprising us.” Paramount, the distributor, cut two crucial scenes in the film, “which took the guts out of the story,” Malden remembered. Photographer Sam Shaw, one of the few people to see the uncut version, called it “a masterpiece, a real romantic western”. Malden concurred: “If we’d made it the way Marlon wanted it to be made, like a Greek tragedy, it could have been a breakthrough western. It could have been a classic.” And yet, I liked the film, especially its brilliant setup. Who is the bad guy and who is the good guy in this story of two American bandits (Brando and Malden) robbing banks in Mexico? One of them, Rio (Marlon), is caught, while the other one, Dad (Malden) gets away with the help of Rio, takes the money, forgets about his friend and makes a decent life as a husband and father and sheriff of a small town across the border. Rio seeks revenge when they meet again, but you suddenly realise there is not that clear delineation between characters and it is that very thin line between villain and hero, right and wrong, that drives the film, even though Marlon lamented about the final version that “now the characters in the film are black and white, not grey and human as I planned them”.

It’s tempting to speculate how the film would have differed in Marlon’s intended version. The ending does indeed seem forced, the good and evil are not that interchangeable as Marlon had intended, but this is piece of filmmaking that has your attention from start to finish, not in small part because of its director’s eye for detail and preference for a backdrop, Monterey and the coast of the Pacific Ocean, quite unusual for a western. And without wanting to take away anything from all the other great performances in the film, there is also, without a shadow of a doubt, the unforgettable face and presence of Marlon Brando, which simply commands attention no matter what.

Cure, 1997
Kiyoshi Kurosawa

I don’t think I have ever seen anything like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s unpredictable, terrifyingly thought-provoking film that combines thriller, psychological thriller and horror and yet defies characterisation. There have been few moments in films when I realistically feared what would happen to a character – it’s detective Takabe (Kōji Yakusho) whose descend into hell in pursue of a criminal in decaying Tokyo works in far worse ways than sending shivers down you spine… it disturbs your mind.

Charlotte’s Webb, 1973
Charles Nichols and Iwao Takamoto

Now that I have watched the film adapted from the classic children’s book by E.B. White about the special friendship between Wilbur the piglet and Charlotte the spider, I can not imagine it without Debbie Reynolds’s incredible voicing of Charlotte.

On Golden Pond, 1981
Mark Rydell

I watched it recently in the midst of summer and I easily became incredibly attached to it. I would like to return to it every summer. I have written more about it in a previous article, and in some way, I am glad I watched it before summer’s end, because this time of year is bittersweet enough as it is.

Reading

Coast Culture, the new magazine from Cesar Equipment, the rugged and refined Scandinavian brand grounded in nature and its gentle rhythm. “It’s almost like a hybrid of contrasting elements, and that reflects our brand aesthetic well. Our foundation lies in combining elements that normally haven’t been connected,” it’s how co-founder Andreas Åhrman defined the brand in our interview. Coast Culture magazine is a celebration of life by the sea.

The World of La Bagatelle. Bagatel is the home of designer Malene Malling, situated outside of Copenhagen, between the sea and the forest, encouraging a life that follows the seasons very closely, an inner life of books and thoughts as well as of lively dinner parties. This is a soulful book, a window into a family, a creative mind, a brand rooted in a rhythm filled with emotions.

Listening

The podcast: Talking Pictures, a movie memories podcast

The soundtrack: Seven Samurai

The album: Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones

Making

La Bagatelle is a brand that succeeds the challenging balancing act of fitting in while standing out, and there is no other item in their collection that is better reflection of that core value than their most recent launch, the Jimmy Jeans Lot: 01. And the story behind it is nothing short of inspiring. Founder Malene Malling says: “I’m a big believer in going for your dreams. The world doesn’t owe you anything, however, if you’re lucky enough to be given a chance, you should grab it and run with it. I was given a chance with Jimmy Duus, the Art Director who started working with me on my magazines more than a decade ago. He was up for all my ideas and dreams when I started formulating what would one day turn into La Bagatelle. Without Jimmy, much, if not almost everything, would be different at La Bagatelle. He’s a man’s man and there isn’t much he can’t figure out. So when I very early on whispered that my dream was to one day do denim, he listened. And he kept reminding me of the dream, because like me, Jimmy loves denim. And whereas I know how I want them to look and feel, he knows how every little detail should be done to be done right. To put it short: he is a denim nerd if ever there was one. So when I now speak with some authority about denim, it is very much because I lean on his great knowledge. So credit where credit is due: the launch of La Bagatelle’s first pair of denims Lot: 01 were always meant to be called Jimmy Jeans.”

La Bagatelle reflects a love of easy elegance done with an artisan’s touch. Fashion that feels tactile, personal. But I keep returning to the jeans, that active participant to one’s work and life, that we are all so familiar with, but which Malene has made so fresh while still carrying a nostalgic sensibility of things well made and authentically appealing.

Exploring

This summer, Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece Persona – his complex depiction of human identity, frailty, cruelty, social, class and power struggle, in which Alma (Bibi Andersson) is the nurse who is hired to take care of famous actress Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), after she has a breakdown during a performance and suddenly falls silent, and they are both secluded at Elisabet’s doctor’s island summer house, one remaining silent and closed, the other one voluble and opening up – has become the namesake for the newly launched Persona magazine (the first issue, out now, is dedicated to Bella Freud – the publication is a portrait of the most interesting, captivating women of our time, with each issue dedicated to one woman). The film also inspired the play Electra/Persona, with Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss in the lead roles (their reuniting after Tár, where Cate Blanchett is the lead, but Nina Hoss is the first violin, makes me very enthusiastic), at the National Theater in London, for a strictly limited running time, from August 19 to October 10. Electra/Persona, directed by Benedict Andrews, in fact fuses Greek tragedy, namely Sophocles’ Elektra, with Bergman’s psychological Persona and the production features an original score by Tár composer Hildur Guðnadóttir.

On an end note

Just this: Close screens. Open minds.

The regulars

The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Ruthie’s Table 4 with Ruth Rogers. Fashion Neurosis, with Bella Freud. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Sirene Journal, Racquet, Waves & Woods, Legénde, and Monocle, all in print.

”Today I feel that in Persona – and later in Cries and Whispers –
I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances,
when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets
that only the cinema can discover.”

Ingmar Bergman

Persona Magazine no.1 / Jimmy Jeans Lot: 01 / Toshiro Mifune artwork by Tony Stella

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11 August 2026

Stories from the Golden Pond

“On Golden Pond”, 1982. Universal Pictures

On a stormy night, Ethel Thayer drives into the town near where she and her husband, Norman, have a summer lakeside house, gets hold of Charlie, the mailman and his boat (“Oh, Charlie, thank God you’re here! Come on, we’re going for a ride!”) and sets off to look for her husband who has gone fishing and should have returned for hours. She is worried, but rather extremely intrepid than panicky. We already know that Norman and Billy, a young boy who is under their care for the summer, have had a boat accident, because Norman was “crazy enough” (Ethel’s words) to go into the Purgatory Cove, a rocky spot that “eats boats”, and their boat, Thayer IV, had indeed hit a rock, sending him off board. Billy rescued him and they managed to save themselves by clinging onto a rock. Ethel makes Charlie to go right into the Purgatory Cove, gets on up on the deck to point the way, eventually finds her husband and Billy and does not hesitate to plunge into the pond herself, under Charlie’s stunned look, to see if they’re okay. Resilient, resourceful, vivacious, unstoppable. This is Katharine Hepburn’s Ethel Thayer, 74 years of age, in the film On Golden Pond.

When Hepburn had gone to Wilmington, Delaware, to see the play that was later adapted into the film (both written by Ernest Thompson), she remarked: “It was played by two people about fifty, and they were very busy being old and slightly feeble.” That was not her cup of tea. During filming, she swam every day, morning and night. She found it funny. As a child, she used to be dumped into a cold tub every morning. At the time she wrote her book, Me: Stories of my Life, where she made the remark above about the fifty-something actors being very busy looking old, she was 86, and she still swam – winter, summer. At Fenwick, her family’s summer house, she would go across the snowy lawn, her feet freezing, and she would go in. Dip. Swim a stroke – one stroke – and rush out. “What a tremendous opportunity it is just to be alive,” Hepburn wrote. She lived by that motto and in On Golden Pond she shows herself in a new light.

“One more dance with her public was what Kate wanted,” William J. Mann reveals in Kate: The Woman who Was Katharine Hepburn. “And not just in yet another television movie or even a Broadway play. The last act of Katharine Hepburn’s life would take her back to the big screen, setting into motion her final, most glorious transfiguration. Pundits said it was impossible for a seventy-four-year-old actress to star in a successful major motion picture, but Kate proved them wrong. The film was On Golden Pond.”

Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda in “On Golden Pond”, 1981. Universal Pictures

The story about an aging couple who return to their summer lakeside cottage, brought together not only Henry and Jane Fonda on screen for the first time, but Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, too. Ethel and Norman Thayer are visited by their estranged daughter Chelsea (Jane), her fiancé, Bill (Dabney Coleman), and his teenager son, Billy (Doug McKeon). The film explores the difficult relationship between father and daughter, a rift that the mother is continually trying to mediate – “Jane and Hank were busy working out a rather complicated father-daughter relationship, and this was to be the solution. An ambitious father and an ambitious daughter find their solution with an ambitious friend. We all had a good time,”disclosed Hepburn. The film is also about the challenges facing a long-married couple – in their old age, is how grumpy Norman calls them, while, Ethel, vitality impersonated, considers them to be at the far edge of middle age (Fonda’s character celebrates his 80th birthday in the film, although the actor was only 76, but very frail, and Hepburn was 74, as previously mentioned). “Hank and I were the right age, so we weren’t busy acting old,” Katharine mused. “It comes upon one unexpectedly. Suddenly you lose your spring. Your spring in the sense of elasticity. Now – old – you don’t spring up from a chair. You get up. It is a very different act. Henry had lost a little more spring than I had when we were doing the picture and we slid very easily into our relationship. He was wonderful to play with – very true – very natural.”

A very good study of a relationship of a husband and wife who just really liked each other, On Golden Pond is a reflection on family and life, and on a life spent together – we see it in their looks, their silences, their built-in trust, their hands, their wrinkles etched in a life lived side by side. It’s about entering a new stage in life – Norman pondering on his passage through this world, of everything he lived and fought for, desired, achieved and maybe lost, Ethel/Katharine holding her head high, no matter what, fueled by some kind of renewed sense of optimism. I believe it paints an authentic picture of family life and the dynamics of intergenerational relationships. Not perfect, not easy, but humbly waiting to be mended at every turn. The location of the movie was Squam Lake in New Hampshire, and a rustic cabin that is a character in itself. It speaks of a layered family history, it truly feels lived in (how I long for those movies of decades past that are so remote from the much too often displayed pristine aesthetic of today’s set designs), and we see it in every character, how it has marked everyone’s life, in a different way, along those summers spent there while making a home of it, just like the nesting loons on the lake. There are photos plastered all over the walls, that speak of a whole life in frames, little snippets, moments, memories, and once again that reminds me of Katharine’s memoir, of its meandering rhythm that so well evokes life’s course. Because that’s life, especially when you recall it, I imagine, from the far end of it, made up of strings of short stories, not a long, seamless narrative, the way so many autobiographies tend to go. Not Hepburn’s, and I love her even more for that.

Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda and Doug McKeon in “On Golden Pond”, 1981. Universal Pictures

Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn each had their own house to stay in by the lake during filming and the actress fondly remembered how she would often see Fonda take his evening stroll. He liked to sit and fish or paint. She liked to walk through the woods alone. They were both oddies in their own way. “We are quite similar. He doesn’t waste time. No small talk. And I hate to have idiotic conversations.” She gave him a fishing hat that had belonged to Spencer Tracy, and which Fonda wears in the film. At the end of the picture, Fonda returned the gesture by giving Hepburn a painting he did of three hats, Spencer’s in the middle.

I tremendously admire Henry (you just can’t figure Norman out, you don’t know what he’s going to say, and that is sometimes unnerving, sometimes hilarious) and Jane Fonda (how bravely she slips into this role) separately and it was also very special to watch them together on screen, but I can not help rooting for Katharine. Supportive, tough, wisely measured, joyful. She is the driving force. She is ageless. Even with her tremors, which she already suffered from, she is full of energy and life. In her wide-legged jeans, white trousers or khaki pants, sneakers, turtleneck tops underneath oversized shirts (always with the collar turned up and sleeves rolled up), she looks absolutely beautiful. The way Katharine dressed, the way she lived, the way she carried herself was a language in itself. It was a profound beauty in the way she just was. She was a natural, the ultimate eccentric, the first true original, the fearless, uncompromising, unconventional star that did everything her way.

Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn and Doug McKeon in “On Golden Pond”, 1981. Universal Pictures

Me: Stories of My Life, by Katharine Hepburn

Very, very natural and herself: Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby”

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4 August 2026

Read instead…in print #43: Hitchcock & Herrmann, The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema

Why would anyone consider that Hitchcock did the same type of film over and over again? This idea has always puzzled me, because you only have to listen all the different scores that Bernard Herrmann composed for Hitchcock’s films and you know how different each one is from the other. North by Northwest is one of those films I would watch (and have watched) over and over again. From that first sound of Bernard Herrmann’s music, my interest doesn’t waver and I wait with anticipation every next scene as if I didn’t know what is about to happen. And I don’t know how, but it seems to get better every time. Time takes on a different dimension, the rest of the world falls away, and you feel the story in your bones from the get-go. Because that’s Herrmann’s music for a Hitchcock main title sequence does – it encapsulates what the whole film is about and then guides you through.

The Trouble with Harry was the first film Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann worked together on, and “from that point on, Herrmann gave Hitchcock a musical identity in all of the films they made together,” Hitchcock historian and filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau relates in the book Hitchcock & Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema. Exciting, without being didactic, the book does an amazing job at making us understand how music and film are a unified piece of storytelling. And that what Herrmann did for Hitchcock’s films was that he created a language that will run throughout the movies (The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie). As author Steven C. Smith rightfully states, “whatever music can do in a film is something mystical. The camera can only do so much. The actors can only do so much. The director can only do so much. But the music can tell you what people are thinking and feeling.”

Bernard Herrmann passed on the chance to write fresh music for the Albert Hall climax for Hitch’s own remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, because he knew what the film needed, and had no objection to including a song, Che será, será (Whatever Will Be Will Be), something he was always against, because he understood the dramatic purpose of the song. In Vertigo, his score created “a mood of spectral mystery and emotional obsession”. In North by Northwest, “the forerunner of all James Bond films,” in the composer’s own words, the music leaps up and down just as the main character does, his next move as unexpected to us, the audience, as it is to him, but Herrmann knew again when to be silent: “While spotting the picture – determining where music stops and starts – Hitch and Benny agreed that the crop duster attack on Thornhill would be unscored. ‘If you’re a painter, it doesn’t mean that you can’t use black,’ Herrmann later said. ‘And that is a sound: black. Every good artist uses black at times.’” In Psycho, Herrmann said he “was able to complement the black and white photography of the film with a black and white sound,” resulting in “pure ice water”.

I regularly listen to Herrmann’s Hitchcock scores, in rotation with the likes of some of my favourite rock musicians. His music feels alive, it has a way of finding a place in the present, that’s how timeless it is. This is another essential quality of the book – it taps into that spark that defines the far reaching influence of a Herrmann-Hitchcock soundtrack.

MORE STORIES

Read instead…in print #36: North by Northwest: The Man Who Had Too Much

The Birds, the ultimate Hitchcockian heroine and the grandfather figure

Read instead…in print #4: The Birds, by Camille Paglia

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30 July 2026

Jane B. par Agnès V.

Jane Birkin in “Jane B. par Agnès V.”, 1988, directed by Agnès Varda. Ciné-tamaris

The docudrama Jane B. par Agnès V. is a comic portrait of Jane Birkin seen in many forms, across her personal life, professional anecdotes, an ongoing in-film-interview with director Agnès Varda, artistic tableaus and imaginative film roles. Inspired by Jane Birkin’s turning 40 and her retrospective look on her life thus far, the film takes nothing from a pre-existing form. “We played make-belief to get to the truth”, Varda said, and the result is a fascinating collaboration between director and her subject.

Jane Birkin is a woman of many contradictions. She wants to be an ordinary woman, but she also wants to play a goddess. She wants to be looked at, to be loved, but she also wishes to remain anonymous, like everybody else. She wants to be a little girl and she wants to be a grown-up woman, she wants to play every role – and she does, from femme fatale, subject in a renaissance painting, and Calamity Jane, to Joan of Arc, Tarzan’s Jane, and so on. The one I liked the most is probably the character-defying role of Laurel, of Laurel and Hardy, where she plays opposite Laura Betti as Hardy. It was like watching a great short, filled with comedic timing, self-deprecating humour and cynicism.

Varda’s camera adores Birkin, but she isn’t afraid to challenge her contradictions. In fact, contradictions are part of Varda’s cinema. As she told Mireille Amiel, “What almost always interests me in my films is the dialectics between public and private, between subjective and general. The cliché and what’s inside the cliché. It seems to me that this dialectic, this ambiguity, this contradiction of the clichés of our mental life and the images of lived life is really the subject of all my films… All my films are constructed out of such a contradiction-juxtaposition.” Jane B. par Agnès V., maybe more than any other documentary she made, is proof of that. Varda believed that “there’s no fiction without its documentary side, no film without an esthetic intent”.

Jane Birkin in “Jane B. par Agnès V.”, 1988, directed by Agnès Varda. Ciné-tamaris

This is a film where Varda is having fun, because it’s a comic portrait of Jane Birkin, but there’s also this certain sensibility that defines it, the truthful bits that Varda is skillful and sensible enough to catch when Birkin lets her guard down (when she talks about her children, Kate Barry, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, her lovers, Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Doillon, or her upbringing in Britain). It’s a warm portrait and an intimate film. Agnès Varda was a director who did things her way. She started out as a photographer, she didn’t go to film school, nor had she watched many films that could have trained her eye. But, as it happened, it was in cinema that she found her language. And she was free to invent her own language. She wanted to make films that related to the times, not films that followed a path. She believed that cinema should only come from cinema, she didn’t want to adapt books into films. She made films to share ideas, emotions, a way of looking at life. Finding adventure where not everything has been said and done. It was Varda who made the first French New Wave film, La Pointe Courte, in 1955.

I am longing for the times when newsstands in any corner of the world were spilling with hundreds of newspapers and magazines. “Jane B. par Agnès V.”, 1988, directed by Agnès Varda. Ciné-tamaris

The first film I saw Jane Birkin in was Jacques Deray’s La piscine, opposite Romy Schneider, Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet. “When watching the film today, one cannot help but admire the casting choices. Delon, Ronet, Schneider, Birkin, and Crauchet all seem made for their roles – with an apparent inevitability that masks the difficulties, the false starts, the ideas (good or bad), the detours, and the clashes with a producer who remained undecided about actually making the film,” Deray remarked. “As for Jane Birkin – whom I met by chance – I once wrote a few words about her in a magazine: ‘Because she was dining in Saint-Germain-des-Prés one evening in 1968; because she had a unique accent, a distinctive way of smiling, laughing, walking, and showing surprise; and because she carried a large straw bag, Jane found herself, just a few days later, poolside alongside some of the biggest stars.’”

Birkin’s character, a very young and gamine Pénélope, both lovely and insolent, emanating a carefree spontaneity, is part tomboy (her flared jeans and simple white t-shirt are a look synonymous with Jane Birkin, that timeless look that continues to inspire generations of women at various stages of their lives), part temptress (the crocheted white and black cover-ups are a perfect example of the innocent-sexy style Jane Birkin became famous for at the start of her career), and she is the cause of the rapture that ensues between the characters. “There was one thing I was very stubborn about: I wanted to do my own makeup and wear my own dresses,” Jane Birkin recalled about the film. “When you watch the film today, it’s a disaster of bad taste! With those huge saucer-like glasses and my bangs, I look like the Easter Bunny!”

Jane Birkin in “Jane B. par Agnès V.”, 1988, directed by Agnès Varda. Ciné-tamaris

It was a time when she favoured bohemian staples – crochet crop tops, bell-sleeved mini dresses, basket bags, tops trimmed with lace, eyelet embroidery or ruffles. Romantic and provocative, and very different from the style Jane Birkin ultimately became so appreciated and admired for. Fashion whims and baby doll looks – very 1960s British mod – that gradually became something else, an understated elegance that simply bloomed in Birkin’s adoptive France. On the set of La Piscine, Birkin also remembered how “Romy was very protective of me – a truly honest person with a big heart. There was a lot of talk about me back then, before anyone had actually seen anything… Yet, in La Piscine, I was invisible… just a bland, unremarkable young girl… The real sensation of the film was Romy… she was magnificent!” She was.

Jane Birkin in “Jane B. par Agnès V.”, 1988, directed by Agnès Varda. Ciné-tamaris

There are traces of that childlike personality, youthful flirting and wandering, in Jane B. par Agnès V., but it truly feels that what we see is a portrait of a woman in transition, someone who approaches middle age with reservations but a carefree ease that she trusts entirely. She is maturing in front of Varda’s camera. Her clothes ground that feeling. Her jeans, sneakers, plain t-shirts, cardigans, leather jackets, blazers. This look is Jane Birkin. A style striking in its simplicity, but a style that has evolved naturally, that has come with age.

Birkin tells Varda on camera that she would like to make a film about who she really is, in jeans, old sweaters, messy hair, barefoot in her garden, just for once to forget about film costumes, to be filmed like she was transparent, anonymous, just like anyone else. Varda immediately challenges her, because the director herself revels in paradoxes: “You want stardom and all its perks – money, glamour, fame… Yet you want to be filmed like the people in the street, like the ones who love you. You are different, but want to seem nondescript. You want to be a famous nobody.”

The legendary Birkin bag by Hermès makes an appearance in the film, too. A couple of years ago a Birkin bag once owned by the actress was sold for millions of pounds at auction. That speaks volumes about the impact Jane Birkin has had on fashion and of herself as a style icon. But leaving that aside, and the fact that the Birkin bag is undoubtedly an object of luxury, in the film the Birkin (besides being part of one of the fabricated characters that Jane is playing) is more of a practical and generously stuffed leather tote that simply accompanies Jane everywhere, a trusted companion filled with bits and pieces of her life. She pulls off another one of her contradictions, remaining natural yet glamourous.

“I’m Jane B. Born English. My height is now 5 feet 7 inches. No distinguishing marks. No exceptional talents, but I’m here. You’re watching me as time passes.”

Jane B. par Agnès V. …, denim par Jane B. …, liberté par Agnès V.

Jane Birkin in “Jane B. par Agnès V.”, 1988, directed by Agnès Varda. Ciné-tamaris

Editorial sources: “Agnès Varda Interviews”, edited by T. Jefferson Kline, “Jacques Deray: J’ai connu une belle epoque”, “La Piscine”, by Luc Larriba

Jacques Demy in black & white and his quiet yet lyrical heroines

“We are taking culture into our own hands”:
In conversation with Cinéma La Clef

Posted by classiq in Film, Film costume | | Comments Off