How Agnès Varda Became an Icon of Cinema

With classic filmmakers, a biography is a peek behind the scenes, whether a debunking or an astonishment—a view of the human element that made grand achievements possible. With modern filmmakers, whose work is already inescapably personal, a biography is a virtual extension of the films they’ve made. Agnès Varda is a central modern filmmaker, and Carrie Rickey’s fervently detailed and briskly narrated new biography, “A Complicated Passion” (Norton), reveals that the coalescence of Varda’s art and life was even more thoroughgoing than is apparent from the films themselves. The story that Rickey tells imparts a retrospective sense of destiny—a vision of a career that ran long enough, and changed enough along the way, as to cast the entire scope of Varda’s lifelong activity in a cinematic light. Even the details of her pre-cinematic youth seem to line up in a pattern that leads inevitably to movies.