Ydessa, les ours et etc. Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

Ydessa, les ours et etc. 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.

If you've ever wondered what a 17 million (plus) dollar statue of a kneeling, somewhat childlike, Adolf Hitler might look like, taking a gander at the first screenshot accompanying this review may either introduce you to or remind you of this now infamous work by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who entitled this almost inevitably disturbing piece Him. Him sold for that arguably exorbitant amount in auction in 2016. Him might not really appear to be all that germane to what would seem to be Agnès Varda's focus in Ydessa, les ours et etc., namely a Toronto artist named Ydessa Hendeles and her curation of an installation she called Partners, which offered a rather peculiar set of historical photographs depicting people with teddy bears, an exhibit which rather shockingly then "gave way" to an interior room which featured this weirdly disturbing sculpture. That may seem entirely anachronistic until, however, it attains some power once Hendeles gets into discussing her parents, who were survivors of the Holocaust.

Hendeles seems to suggest that the photographs also "testify" to the Holocaust, but unfortunately neither the installation nor Varda's documentation of it offer much in the way of actual information or context, so some of this piece can come across as being a bit on the random side. Still, this is another Varda documentary that has a supposedly surface meaning, and then tons of subtext, some of it extremely unsettling.

Ydessa, les ours et etc. Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Ydessa, les ours et etc. is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of The Criterion Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.38:1. This is one of the few pieces in this collection without any prefatory text, and like The Gleaners and I, I'm assuming that may be because this was shot with minicams, something that is perhaps supported by the IMDb's listing of a "digital" negative. This is certainly better detailed and less processed looking than The Gleaners and I, but it still has a pronounced video like appearance. The palette is quite impressive throughout, especially with regard to things like Ydessa's bright orange hair, and fine detail in close-ups is typically very good. Varda engages in a few stylistic flourishes, as in a sequence where she superimposes "Him" on images of people talking about the exhibit, and detail levels are understandably a bit muddled in these moments.

Ydessa, les ours et etc. Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Ydessa, les ours et etc. is another short in this collection which features only lossy audio, in this case a Dolby Digital 2.0 track that is listed as being in French, but which does include some English, notably when Ydesse herself speaks (as with some of the other "bilingual" offerings in this set, the subtitles only translate the French and disappear during the English language moments). This is comprised pretty much entirely of narration and first person talking head material, along with some chamber music courtesy of Isabelle Olivier, and everything sound fine within a lossy context. Optional English subtitles (as described above) are available.

Ydessa, les ours et etc. Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Introduction from 2007 (1080i; 1:43) offers Varda's thoughts. In French with English subtitles.

Ydessa, les ours et etc. Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Ydessa, les ours et etc. might have had more resonance if Varda had been able to find a way to more viscerally connect her "text" and "subtext" here, but this is another completely peculiar and kind of fascinating documentary. This was evidently culled from a video source and this is another short with only lossy audio.