‘Christmas Carole’: the festive Agnès Varda film that never was
There’s a difference between a Christmas film and a film set at Christmas. It’s unclear which route Agnès Varda would’ve taken with her film Christmas Carole, since her attempts at festivity were quickly shut down by some film executive Scrooge.
It’s frustrating to think of films that could’ve been but never were. Varda was one of the greatest filmmakers of her generation, able to write sharp and poignant scripts that largely dealt with feminist themes and emphasised humanism.
Back in the mid-1960s, Varda had an idea to explore the capitalistic vision of Christmas that defines modern society, using Gérard Depardieu, a newcomer at the time, as the voice of disillusionment. He’d never acted before, but Varda clearly saw something in him, giving him the role of Igor, who stresses his distaste for having to give gifts to people that he doesn’t even care about.
“Always thinking about work,” he says to Carole, “Can’t you see what a circus it all is? The folly of money. I buy, I give, He buys, he gives. Same old song. Money! Money! Money!”
Varda accompanies his conversation with shots of glittering shop windows, where excess is displayed in the name of giving and celebration. Really, it’s just a ploy for us to spend and spend until our pockets are dry, the film seems to suggest.
Sadly, though, Varda’s thesis on the capitalistic nature of Christmas never got the chance to get off the ground, and all that remains is a five-minute screen test where Depardieu and two other actors, Francis Merle and Hélène Viard (who didn’t go on to appear in anything else), pretty much just walk or sit in a café and talk.
While this might sound like it could become a preachy, bah-humbug attack on the joy of Christmas, Varda’s filmmaking skills have never been that one-dimensional.
You can tell that Varda would’ve made this into something much more compelling by the speech that Depardieu’s character gives near the end of the screen test, in which he delivers some archetypal fuck-boy lines way ahead of their time. It’s darkly fitting that this character is played by Depardieu.
Igor tries to get Carole to sleep with him, saying, “If making love with Paul makes you so unhappy, do it with us instead. We can call it ‘making friendship.’”
Varda is clearly poking fun at Igor’s insistence here, highlighting the irony in his distaste for transactional gift-giving at Christmas, but not hesitating to present a transactional opportunity to his female friend, turning her into an object he could capitalise on using manipulative language to soften the blow of his rather cheeky ask.
Despite the fact that Varda had recently made Cleo from 5 to 7 and Le Bonheur, she somehow failed to impress distributors with this festive anti-capitalist idea, and now it remains just a fragment of her early career – an interesting example of what could’ve been if she’d made a Christmas film.
