Agnès Varda takes her time making movies, and time takes her. Some say she started the French New Wave in 1954 with her first feature, La pointe courte. Nonetheless, she would not make another movie for seven years, and in the following four decades only a half dozen or so more, few noted. Unlike her more flamboyant male colleagues — François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais — with their antiheroic protagonists struggling against the system, she focused on the beauty and the ephemerality of the natural system that embraces all. Her films, some showing in a brief retrospective this week at the Brattle Theatre, seek to immortalize transience, to breathe eternal life into mortal clay.

Time is of the essence even in the title of her second film, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962; Monday and Tuesday 7:30). The striking opening sequence finds a fortune teller reading the cards for Cléo (Corinne Marchand, a beauty somewhere between Brigitte Bardot and Edith Piaf); the prognosis is not good. As soon as the death card comes out, the film switches to black and white, but the two hours that pass before Cléo learns the result of a medical test are as brisk and fresh as an ocean breeze.

Drawing playfully on her documentary inclinations, Varda takes the film minute by minute through Cléo’s vain, capricious, and touching activities, sometimes deferring to the point of view of others in her heroine’s life. There’s her maid; there’s her sugar-daddy lover, who never has time for her, her songwriters (she’s a fledgling pop star with three singles released; when she plays one in a café it’s ignored); there’s a friend who works as a sculptor’s model (“They don’t see me. They see a form, an idea,” she says, summing up Western culture). And there’s Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller, who looks like a wizened Tommy Lee Jones), a silver-tongued charmer who himself is on the clock, a soldier waiting to set sail for Algeria. “I wish I could be with you,” he says when the news is learned at last. “You are,” she replies, and so he will remain forever, as will a splendid evening in Paris on the first day of summer.

That’s Jean-Luc Godard, by the way, badly imitating either Buster Keaton or Maurice Chevalier in a brief film within-the-film that plays a variation on the rose-colored-glasses theme. Despite the formidable company of the Cahiers du cinéma crowd, Varda was content neither as muse nor as acolyte. She married Jacques Demy, and the influence of his dark but effervescent Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964; Wednesday at 5:30 and 9:30 p.m.) is felt but transcended in her Le bonheur (“Happiness”; 1965; Monday and Tuesday at 5:30 and 9:30 p.m.).

Instead of the infectious Michel Legrand score in Umbrellas, Le bonheur dances to the dark and jolly Mozart Clarinet Concerto as Varda shifts from the hours of Cléo to seasons. It’s midsummer, and François (Peter Gallagher look-alike Jean-Claude Drouot), a young carpenter in a provincial town, is sickeningly happy as he cavorts with his wife (Drouot’s real-life wife, Claire) and two tots (played by their actual children) in the country among the sunflowers. The film is so rife with florid joy, even the fades between scenes are made to lush colors instead of black, and on the TV is playing Jean Renoir’s Le dejéuner sur l’herbe.

Something has to give, of course, and happy-go-lucky François falls for a postal clerk. He’s an honest cad, however; devoid of anxiety or guilt, he truly believes that the extramarital affair adds to rather than diminishes the general happiness. Perhaps he’s right. The last scene, nearly identical to the opening family outing but set in the bronze light of autumn, suggests that nature and time overcome all griefs, and that is something terrible.

Winter is the season of Vagabond (1985; Thursday at 7:30 p.m.), which opens with Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), the title heroine, lying frozen in a ditch, her rags daubed with wine dregs. She has died, as the narrator tells us, “a natural death without leaving a trace.” Or has she? In quasi-documentary fashion the film retraces Mona’s last weeks as those she bumps into along the road vaguely recall her. Most accounts are projections of the speaker’s own desire, and these comments directly addressed to the camera are the weakest moments in the film (except for a Tunisian fieldhand who mutely sniffs a swatch of cloth).

More eloquent are the cold and barren vineyards of the south of France and the corroded façades of the abandoned châteaux, and of course Bonnaire’s unwashed, truculent, utterly vulnerable face. She comes from the sea and is undone in a pagan rite, and along the way crossed fates and coincidences bring neither meaning nor closure. Vagabond is one of the greatest films of the 1980s and a vintage work from one of the world’s great filmmakers.

Issue Date: April 19-26, 2001