Agnès Varda in "The Beaches of Agnès," Cinema Guild, 2009

“Film me in old, spotty mirrors and behind scarves,” says 81-year old filmmaker Agnès Varda, the director and subject of “The Beaches of Agnès,” a memoir of Varda’s life and career. Varda says this while standing on a beachside film set surrounded by crew members one-fifth her age. She covers her face with a scarf; the breeze ripples through it. She’s smiling because she could care less if the camera flatters her; she’s past that.

The most prominent female filmmaker of the French New Wave, Varda rose to international fame at age 34 with “Cléo from 5 to 7.” But she was no here-and-gone curiosity; over the decades, she continued not just working, but evolving, maintaining aesthetic consistency while embracing new subjects, styles and techniques. Her last stateside success, the 2000 documentary “The Gleaners and I,” was one of the decade’s more intimate and unpretentious nonfiction movies; it found Varda embracing low-res video and building upon the essay-movie format practiced by her colleague Chris Marker (“La Jetée, Sans Soleil”). “Beaches” is more conceptually complex, but wears that complexity as lightly as the scarf Varda draws across her face: you know, and she wants you to know, that she’s placing a scrim between herself and the viewer, but the act is never evasive or misleading because the movie is as translucent as that scarf, making sure to reveal the grin behind the fabric.

Varda was always a palpably present auteur, each film as frank and immediate-seeming as a journal entry. This time, she puts herself front-and-center in the manner of Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog, who over the decades morphed from insistently auteurist voices into philosopher-emcees, shambling through self-constructed fact/fiction hybrids and serving up gnomic wisdom and groan-inducing wisecracks along with the expected auto-critical flourishes. In “Beaches,” Varda foregrounds her “performance,” incidentally exploring the notion that being oneself on camera entails the same sorts of imaginative leaps and in-the-moment decisions as playing wholly invented characters. What we’re seeing isn’t Varda, but the Essence of Varda as conceived by the director -- not unlike Godard’s time-traveling observer/critic shtick in 2004’s “Notre Musique,” minus the smug brooding.

Varda slips into the role of Mother Time and hams it up, employing photographs and mementos as Proustian triggers, guiding us through her childhood and adulthood, remembering her collaborations with such luminaries as Jean Vilar, Alain Resnais and her late husband Jacques Demy (whose life was recounted in Varda’s “Jacquot de Nantes”), even reconnecting with a couple of onetime child actors from her film “La Pointe Courte” and having them re-create a scene from the movie as old men. (The effect is wonderfully discombobulating, a Max Fischer production inverted.)

Some of Varda’s flourishes are so on-the-nose that they’re corny. She’s aware that they’re corny; the corniness is the point, and her comic timing is impeccable. She stays a half step ahead of the viewer, then serves up an image that says, in effect, “I know what you’re thinking, dear viewer, and I thought of it already.” The instant you’ve mentally characterized “The Beaches of Agnès” as a series of mirrors within mirrors, Varda shows you a mirror reflecting another mirror. It’s semiotics as vaudeville. The wry but never overweening tone tells us that Varda is not just aware that she’s mediating our perception of her life and art, the act of mediation is the film’s true subject.

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