Jane B. by Agnès V.

Jane Birkin is the subject of this portrait, made by her friend Agnès Varda over roughly a year and prompted by Birkin turning forty. The film moves between the private woman and the public figure, showing Birkin in a series of invented roles and imagined scenes rather than in a single fixed identity. She appears variously as Joan of Arc, Calamity Jane and the Jane of Tarzan, alongside glimpses of Birkin herself, with the line between documentation and make-believe deliberately left unclear.

Varda directed and wrote the film, which sits in the middle of her career: it is the ninth of the fourteen features she directed, following Vagabond and preceding Kung-Fu Master! Birkin plays versions of herself, and the cast includes Jean-Pierre Léaud, Philippe Léotard, Farid Chopel, Alain Souchon and Serge Gainsbourg. Produced in France by Ciné-Tamaris and La Sept Cinéma, it runs 99 minutes and mixes documentary with fantasy, with the fictional interludes giving shape to the portrait. On TMDB it holds a rating of 6.8 from 68 votes, a modest but solid figure suggesting a small, appreciative audience rather than a broad one.