With Kung-fu Master! (1988) legendary filmmaker Agnès Varda turns her lens towards an inverted Lolita narrative where a middle aged woman (Jane Birkin) has a love affair with her daughter’s classmate (Mathieu Demy). As is characteristic of Varda the film is overflowing with compassion for the players in this taboo drama. Varda never ceases to empathize with these characters even after they have pursued their verboten love and have lost almost everything.
Some have said that Kung-fu Master! is a toxic, inappropriate work of cinema. But there are literally hundreds of such films made about older men having love affairs with young girls that romanticize predatory behavior. Varda never romanticizes anything in Kung-fu Master!, she merely treats her characters, no matter their flaws, as genuine human beings. By the end of the film justice is served and Jane Birkin’s character Mary-Jane has lost custody of her eldest daughter (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and is essentially shunned by society. Neither of these points are common to such films as they deal with men and their desires. This is the purpose of the film really. For Varda and Birkin Kung-fu Master! is about taking what is traditionally a masculinist text and making it for and about women.
Kung-fu Master! was Birkin’s idea. It came to her whilst collaborating with Agnès Varda on the film Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988). Like Jane B. par Agnès V., Kung-fu Master! casts Birkin’s own real life family as her character Mary-Jane’s family with the addition of Varda’s son playing Mary-Jane’s love interest. In many ways Kung-fu Master! is a continuation of the portrait of Birkin in Jane B. par Agnès V. though this time it is an entirely imagined portrait.
One of the best parts of Kung-fu Master! is that which is hardly ever discussed; Varda’s sense of humor. The movie opens with Mathieu Demy enacting his character’s favorite video game (from which the film gets its title) to the soundtrack of the game. It’s a wonderfully silly image that establishes the importance of the game to the relationship that will grow between Birkin and Demy. There’s another moment later on where Demy phones Birkin to ask her on a date but before Birkin speaks into the receiver Birkin’s interior thoughts are heard in voice over. It’s an ironically literary device on Varda’s part that nonetheless works to cue the audience in on the fact that Birkin’s Mary-Jane is as aware of her foolishness as we are.
Kung-fu Master! isn’t Varda’s greatest film, but it’s still a fascinating piece of cinematic art. Problematic as it may be it still says more about the types of relationships that it depicts than most similar films do. Add to that the fact that it’s approaching the material from an exclusively female perspective and one has to face the fact that it is a wholly unique cinematic experience that must be valued. Even if one takes issue with the content one cannot deny that it is a responsibly made work of art that has some merit of worth to cinema culture.
