For all its melancholy and its profound awareness of mortality, The Beaches of Agnès is one of the jolliest, more life-affirming self-portraits in recent cinema.

Varda, free from fear and shame, turns her tale of a life lived in art into a work of art in its own right, and one of her best-a rapturous tribute to life itself.

As evidenced in The Beaches of Agnès, Varda is too venerable to be hip -- and too wholly alive to be venerated.

The overall effect is bittersweet and profoundly inspiring: as with the mirrors she places in front of the tide in the film's first scene, she’s showing us it’s possible to face the inescapable with a twinkle in your eye.