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Kung-fu Master! (Agnès Varda, 1988)
🕑 Added 2020-11-01 19:37:19 +0000 UTC
An undeniably bizarre film, Kung-fu Master! seems almost designed to, well, punch and kick at the boundaries of French cinematic lyricism. From its prosaic upper-middle class Parisian trappings to the main character's return to a childhood home in the countryside (Britain in this case, rather than Provence) and right up to an eventual retreat to an isolated island paradise, Varda's film operates in the romantic mode of a Truffaut or a Téchiné, saturating her film's lovers in natural light and protecting them from society's judgment.
But of course, we are free to judge, or at least bristle, as is our protagonist Mary-Jane (Jane Birkin), who has to grapple with the fact that she has fallen in love with the 14-year-old boy. Julien (Varda's son, Mathieu Demy) is notable for being rather sad and unremarkable, a blank slate onto which Mary-Jane can project her own desires. And at least until Kung-fu Master!'s denouement, only Mary-Jane's daughter Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg) has any reasonable response to what's happening around her. This seems to have everything to do with society's general dissonance when it comes to seeing women as predators, a double-consciousness that Mary-Jane herself relies upon in her own thinking.
There's a strange, continual intrusion of PSAs and pamphleteers in the film, constantly bringing up the AIDS crisis. This being 1988, it's not completely out of the realm of possibility. But there seems to be something else going on here. For one thing, Varda was aware that her own husband was dying of the disease, something she would not disclose for many years to come. But also, Kung-fu Master! seems to obliquely address the double-standard that Jacques Demy (and Varda) faced with respect to Demy's bisexuality. Mary-Jane's life choices are not endorsed by the film, but Varda looks upon them with sympathy, something she seems to have felt lacking in others with respect to her own unconventional romantic arrangement.
If late Varda was frequently adorable, this Varda is much more complicated. But both exhibit the same uncompromising acceptance. Indeed, nothing human was foreign to Agnès Varda.
