Interview

Never mind the ravages of time. Filmmakers seem to be exempt. In her winsome, haunting self-portrait, The Beaches of Agnès, which is released theatrically on July 1, French director Agnès Varda has retained all the vitality, humor, and sheer cinematic inventiveness that has marked her films since 1954's seminal La Pointe Courte, which she made on a shoestring budget at the age of 25. She'd always wanted to sail to Paris-well, in Beaches, she does. We see her coolly navigating a small dinghy under the Pont Neuf along the Seine. She treats the film as an opportunity for playful wish fulfillment as well as for analysing her life experiences, her filmic hits . . . and the odd miss.Hailed as a precursor to the Nouvelle Vague, La Pointe Courte, her black-and-white debut feature, was a neorealist love story with parallel subplots set in a Mediterranean fishing village. She revisits that location in the new film, providing a moving tribute to the locals who, in acting out their life stories, had helped launch her career. The appreciation is mutual. In Sète, they've named a street after her.

Spanning half a century, Varda's career  includes the landmark real-time drama Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), about a pop singer awaiting the results of a cancer test (a priceless cameo shows a diffident Jean-Luc Godard removing his sunglasses); Le Bonheur (1965), a stylized melodrama concerning the unintended fallout from adultery; Vagabond (1985), starring the 18-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire as a homeless free spirit, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival; and two documentaries devoted to her late husband, director Jacques Demy: Jacquot de Nantes (1991) and The World of Jacques Demy (1995).

Walking backward (literally) into her past without a misstep, and using  the beach as a springboard for her memories and reveries, Varda  deftly intercuts photographs and archival footage with clips from her films and reenactments. Revealing a life inextricably mixed with art, through an ingenious juxtaposition of images and wordplay, Beaches is a fascinating demonstration of imagination at work, of fact morphing into fiction. Full of self-deprecating wit, wisdom and whimsy, the film shows  her transition from photographer to filmmaker; her stark early working conditions;  her travels to Cuba and China as a photojournalist; and, later, to Los Angeles with Demy.  Inviting a troupe of trapeze artists to Sete beach, she's not afraid to show her taste for the populist circus as much as her love for ancient art, which she studied at Ecole du Louvre.

After the international success of The Gleaners and I (2000), a personal documentary essay about people who live on others' leftovers, Varda reinvented herself as a video-installation artist. The Beaches of Agnès won the French Union of Film Critics' prize for best film in 2008 and the César for best documentary this year. Despite her demanding travel schedule, in person Varda is no less sharp-eyed, vivacious, or considerate than in her film.