Kung-Fu Master

KUNG-FU MASTER   ***1/2

Agnès Varda

1988

IDEA:  A divorced woman becomes besotted with her daughter's 15-year-old classmate.

BLURB:  The arcade game that gives Agnès Varda’s film its title takes on an unexpectedly poignant significance. Beyond its most obvious narrative functions – as escapism for Julien, as metaphor for his “rescuing” of the “captive” Mary-Jane – it demonstrates how both people and things can become sites of our imaginary identification. In other words, the Kung-Fu Master is Julien’s ego ideal, possessing all the physical strength and mastery he himself lacks. This is crucial to understanding Mary-Jane’s infatuation with the boy. She is drawn to him because in her mind, he represents things she’s missing, or things that have been putatively lost: innocence, vitality, romantic and filial ideals of love. Jane Birkin’s intense but distinctly gawky performance communicates the emotional stuntedness that would lead an adult to seek, and desiringly project, these things in a child. And Varda, ever delicate and nonjudgmental in approach, defuses this potentially sensationalistic relationship with a sensitivity toward the psychologies of the humans that comprise it. Mary-Jane desperately longs for an affection deferred in her past, and she regresses so she can rediscover it; Julien wishes to grow up. But they are not, and could never be, on the same page. Varda wistfully conveys the vagaries of aging through Mary-Jane’s sad yearning, using the generational gulf between the characters to underscore the distances that time inevitably creates, but that hopefully aren’t unbridgeable.