Agnès Varda was 34 when her first major work, Cleo from 5 to 7, hit the Cannes Film Festival and, later that year, New York City. The Belgian nymph, joyous and brilliant, would also marry fellow filmmaker Jacques Demy that year, a marriage that would be plagued by gossip that Varda was simply a beard for Demy's rumored homosexuality. Compatriot of Jean-Luc Godard, friend of Anna Karina, Varda remains a filmmaker of concentrated inventiveness and boundless vitality over 40 years after the release of Cleo.

Now, a month after celebrating her 81st birthday, Varda releases The Beaches of Agnes, a delightful and creative autobiography written in celluloid; a work the director herself has referred to as a collage. The "collage" opens on Varda as she sets up a small encirclement of mirrors of several different shapes and sizes, reflecting the filmmaker and her "inner landscape" as she reflects on the young people who helped her build this deconstructionist prologue to her life. It is said that great artists are minor figures in the story of their lives and Varda never seems hesitant on giving due credit to her friends, family, and every small hand that helped her create.

Much of The Beaches of Agnes goes towards revisiting rather than revisionism. When visiting her childhood home, the director seems even more interested in the lives of the abiding couple who lives there than she does her own past. Similar is her attitude toward her own films. As she speaks lovingly of her first film, La Pointe Courte, she films the two old men that grew from the children in that film, recreating a short scene from the film. Art imitates life and vice versa, sure, but Varda uses film as a memory machine, rethinking and redeploying key moments in her life as funky juxtapositions and fireworks displays of sincere nostalgia.

Out of all of this, however, much is focused on her life with husband Jacques Demy, who she reveals died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 59. Varda has already made one film about her late husband, 1991's Jacquot de Nantes, which was based on Demy's memoirs of his childhood; Beaches of Agnes is even more aching in its treatment of a time period lost. Varda's relationships all seem to be reassembling and deconstructing throughout the film, yet this seems to be the one kept completely intact. One can tell, even as the director dances with her children and grandchildren on the beach, that there is a great sense of loss at the heart of the film.

What I truly love about The Beaches of Agnes is its unpretentious and wholly optimistic attitude toward art and life. It never becomes soggy with mythology nor does it ask us to romanticize an artist's life. Even the pictures of Varda frolicking with Jim Morrison in the grass and a gleeful snippet of Harrison Ford declaring his admiration seem to be stripped of the red mascara of celebrity. It feels like the summation that the young Varda wanted to make after Cleo about a life she had not yet lived. Intoxicated with the rejuvenating nature of art, Varda has done what many artists have attempted to do but either wouldn't or couldn't: She has made a film that acknowledges time and age without completely giving into their grim results.

Aka Les plages d'Agnès.