School’s out. The day is long. The freezer is full of popsicles. Today marks the official start of summer. When it comes to summer on the silver screen, no one captured summer’s strange and wonderful blend of idleness and excess quite like Agnès Varda.
In Along the Coast (1958), a 24-minute kaleidoscope of seaside life on the French Riviera, Varda turns her lens to beach towns caught between leisure and spectacle. An early Varda, initially made for French television at the behest of French tourist agencies, the film glides from one brightly saturated scene to the next: red parasols and crowded beaches, opulent villas and salt-of-the-earth locals, sunburnt tourists and the ghosts of tradition. Varda’s narration floats above it all: dry, lyrical, occasionally bemused, as if she’s flipping through a vacation slideshow while whispering poetry over your shoulder.
There’s no plot to follow. For me, that’s the point. Like the best summer days, Along the Coast unfolds without urgency. It’s interested in textures, contradictions, and the strange rituals we invent when we try to relax. Varda takes her assignment further than a simple show of beauty. She sees the coast not just as a playground but as a mirror: for colonial fantasies, for the construction of leisure, and the performance of wealth. But she’s not here to scold. She’s here to notice. And what she notices is often beautiful, often ridiculous, sometimes both at once.
Made a few years before Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Along the Coast offers a glimpse of Varda in an in-between phase: part photographer, part sociologist, part poet. You can see her style sharpening as she studies faces, gestures, movement, and color. Even in this early short, her empathy and curiosity feel endless. Agnès Varda follows her assignment and makes a tourist film that shows the weird beauty of humans. Subverting the assignment, she goes on to show us the unadulterated beauty of untouched nature. Changing the assignment, she imagines and shows us a fantastical combination of the two, before bringing us back to earth, where humans dominate.
If you’d like a jolt of Mediterranean color to kick your summer off, Along the Coast is like a postcard from a friend who sees things for what they are, for better or worse, ugly and/or beautiful, and opens your eyes to seeing it too.
Along the Coast (Du côté de la côte)
Written and Directed by Agnès Varda
1958
26 minutes
French
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on YouTube and the Criterion Channel
You’ll like this if you like: La Pointe Courte (1955), vacation slideshows, 1960s postcards, parasols, early Godard without the cigarette smoke