Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.0

Ulysse Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 31, 2020

Note: This film is available as part of The Complete Films of Agnès Varda.

In the wake (figurative or otherwise) of Agnès Varda’s death last year at the age of 90, quite a bit has rightfully been written about this iconic force in both French and global cinema. Varda’s output includes well over fifty credits as a director (including some television entries as detailed by the IMDb), and aside from listing some of her better known triumphs, many obituaries and/or eulogies about Varda mentioned any number of other biographical data points, including her rather unique position as a woman in France’s nouvelle vague movement, her own feminism which was featured none too subtly in some of her films, and her frequently provocative experimental style. But you know what one of the things that kind of fascinates me personally most about Varda? That she was married for 28 years to Jacques Demy, from 1962 until Demy’s death in 1990. That Varda, often a purveyor of verité infused “realism”, whether that be in outright documentaries or at least ostensibly more “fictional” outings, and Demy, a director whose candy colored, dreamlike and at least relatively "Hollywoodized" musicals with Michel Legrand brought a new luster and gloss to French cinema, managed to make a marital go of it for so long is certainly testament to the maxim that “opposites attract”, even if those oppositional forces in this instance played out at least in part in terms of what kinds of films the two were often best remembered for. If Varda's long marriage to Demy is more than enough reason to celebrate her personal life, her professional life is beautifully feted in this rather astounding new set from Criterion, which aggregates an amazing 39 films (albeit some running as short as a few minutes) to provide what is arguably one of the most insightful overviews of Varda's cinematic oeuvre. Perhaps unavoidably, but also undeniably movingly, these personal and professional sides of Varda merge in at least some of the films in this set, including The Young Girls Turn 25, The World of Jacques Demy, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Beaches of Agnès.

Agnès Varda’s work as a still photographer plays into Ulysse, a fascinating if ultimately kind of unfulfilling short that serves as another "reunion" piece in somewhat the same way as some other Varda documentaries like The Young Girls Turn 25. In this case, Varda reconnects with two subjects of a rather famous 1954 photo of hers which rather improbably shows a naked man and naked boy on a beach which also rather disturbingly is littered with the body of a dead goat. There's obviously subtext galore in even thinking about such an image, but one of the frustrating things about Ulysse is that neither of the subjects, now some thirty years older if not noticeably wiser, have very little to say about the shoot, and really when you get right down to it, arguably don't even remember it all that well.

Varda attempts to branch out from this kind of interesting approach by working in various other ways to "analyze" her photograph, but even her own efforts may not end up offering that much "meaning" in the long run. This is an almost Talmudic examination of memory and the meaning of art that may be more profound in the questions it asks than in any answers it offers.

Ulysse Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Ulysse is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of The Criterion Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.66:1. Some prefatory text discloses that this was filmed on 35mm argentic color stock in a 1.66:1 panoramic format, and restored by Ciné Tamaris in 2015 at Laboratory Eclair, with a 2K digital restoration from a 2K scan of the original 35mm negative. Color grading was supervised by Agnès Varda. While the focal photograph and quite a few other stills that Varda features here are in black and white, the main interview segments are in color, and the palette looks natural throughout these interstitial sequences. There are bright pops throughout the color moments, with blues once again often being prevalent, but with reds, as in some of the outfits some kids wear late in the film, looking nicely vivid and accurate. There is some archival black and white film utilized that is in considerably more ragged shape than the bulk of the presentation.

Ulysse Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Many of the shorts in this collection have unfortunately only been granted lossy audio, and Ulysse features a lossy Dolby Digital Mono mix in the original French. That said, this is another Varda piece that frankly doesn't have an overly ambitious sound design, with narration and first person interview segments holding sway almost all of the time, with a few moments of music as in the opening credits sequence. Everything is rendered well enough within the context of lossy audio. As with many of the other films in this set, prefatory text states that E.L. Diapason restored the audio from the original 35mm magnetic mix.

Ulysse Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Introduction from 2007 (1080i; 1:30) offers Varda's thoughts. In French with English subtitles.


• Une Minute Pour Une Image (1080p; 26:43) offers a segment from a French television show with Varda and others discussing a collection of photographs she curated. In French with English subtitles.

Ulysse Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

My hometown of Portland, Oregon has increasingly become a haven for expat notables escaping from the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles, and in that regard I was kind of gobsmacked to find myself standing behind a legendary jazz pianist I had idolized growing up in a line in a local post office one day. I summoned my courage and engaged the guy in a conversation (luckily we quickly discovered we had friends in common), and I was struck in just our brief conversation where I, as a "superfan", seemed to have a better memory of, for example, what he played on certain sessions than he did. There's something at least a little similar going on Ulysse, where the two focal humans in Varda's famous photograph have little to no memory of what took place that day. That may put the kibosh on finding any "meaning" to the event, but this is another really interesting if lesser documentary by Varda.