Agnès Varda, Jane Birkin and Kung-fu Master

Abstract

Kung-fu Master arises from a story by Jane Birkin, where an adult woman and a teenage boy fall in love. Birkin’s story was meant to be realised as one of the dramatised sequences of Jane B. par Agnès V., but it became its own parallel film. In prioritising this story and pushing it to feature length, Varda opens it up for imagining with and beyond Birkin. She makes it a fairy tale, a feminist story about what women may imagine and eroticise, about the grief, pathos, damage, and beauty in this. It becomes a vital part of Varda’s film corpus and of her feminist investigations of different subjectivities and desires, of the affective worlds of contemporary women and children. It takes shape in her tenderness for Jane Birkin, but also in light of her own clearer thinking about childhood, nostalgia, and fantasy. In this film, Varda explores female-authored fantasies in delicate, unabashed, and queer ways. This is part of her feminist legacy for the future. Kung-fu Master is key.