Kung-Fu Master!

Mary Jane is forty, lives with her two daughters and is alone. At her elder daughter's birthday party a boy is smoking in the garden; Julien is fourteen, a classmate of her daughter. They talk. Then they talk again. All of Julien's attention is on an arcade game; he spends hours at the machine and Mary Jane finds him there. The relationship goes on without being told to anyone. Her daughters notice, the families notice, and at some point it has to be stopped. Agnes Varda directs. The story is Jane Birkin's and the film began from her idea. Birkin plays Mary Jane and Varda's son Mathieu Demy plays Julien. Birkin's own daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, play her daughters in the film. It is a French production. The title comes from the arcade game Julien plays, and the machine is where the two characters meet. The matter it treats is the forbidden; the film does not defend the relationship and does not condemn it either, and it leaves the viewer in an uncomfortable place. Varda never makes the boy into an adult; Julien stays a child in every scene, and that choice makes the question heavier. The narrative keeps the end of the eighties in the background; sex education at school and the epidemic fear of the period come into the scenes. The film brings a quiet but constant criticism of the family as an institution. The camera stays long on Birkin's face and much of the story is read there. The ending finishes the relationship and punishes nobody. Its limit is the subject; the relationship at its centre is more uncomfortable now, and the film offers no answer to that. Who it is for: viewers who like Varda and films that ask hard questions. Who it is not for: it is uncomfortable, slow, and the ending sad.