Rialtoview | Kung Fu Master

1h 20m • Drama, Romance • 1988

Agnès Varda and Jane Birkin craft a delicate, provocative portrait of longing, lost youth and a woman searching for escape.

Made alongside JANE B. PAR AGNÈS V., KUNG-FU MASTER! is an intimate collaboration between Agnès Varda and Jane Birkin, featuring Birkin’s real-life family. Birkin plays a middle-aged woman whose search for feeling, youth and escape leads her into a taboo relationship with a teenage boy, handled by Varda with restraint, tenderness and unease.

Rialto Recommends KUNG-FU MASTER! is one of Varda’s most daring and disquieting works: a film that takes an explosive premise and refuses easy judgement. With Jane Birkin at its centre, it becomes a quiet study of loneliness, desire and the ache of trying to recover something already gone. Intimate, unsettling and unmistakably Varda.