The first thing about Agnès Varda’s 1965 romantic drama “Le Bonheur” (“Happiness”), which I discuss in the clip above, is its riot of color, blending the compelling evidence of sharp primary colors with the alluring ambiguities of intermediate tones, a painterly mix that is more reminiscent of the cosmic intimacy of Bonnard’s paintings than of the Impressionist works that Varda references throughout the film. And for Varda, the charms of Impressionism are raw material that she subjects to analysis and criticism—it’s a film in which emotional life and sensual delight are seen through the prism of sociology, psychology, and philosophical reflection.
The second thing about “Le Bonheur” is the pictorial genius with which Varda achieves that analysis. There’s no voiceover or overt intellectual content to suggest the perspective of the social scientist—just the brilliantly conceived images and the conspicuous, fragmented editing scheme by which they yield their hidden content. The credit sequence alone is exemplary; so is the jolting use of shallow and selective focus, in the first scene and throughout (the video producer Monica Racic and I offer a couple of startling examples in the clip). So is the primal device of the cinema, the inclusion of surprisingly disparate elements in a single frame. The contrast between idyllic rural settings and the modern architecture that looms nearby and is beginning to encroach on them comes off like a visual slap. Varda, with her canny compositions and inquisitive camera moves, achieves a rare, perhaps a unique, blend of the aesthetically voluptuous and the intellectually revelatory.
The third thing about “Le Bonheur” is its people and their sensuality. (Varda films the actors at the barest boundary of immodesty, and the film is one of the classics of the nineteen-sixties’ cinema of erotic passion.) The couple at its center, François and Thérèse, are played by a real-life young married couple, Jean-Claude and Claire Drouot (it’s her only film appearance), and the fictional couple’s young children are also the Drouot’s. The hearty simplicity of the performances owes little to technique and much to sincerity and the air of family that Varda inspires. The unprimped, ordinary bodies of the characters as seen in states of undress add greatly to the unforced, sweaty sensuality that she captures—and that she subjects to an unsparing study even as she celebrates it.
The fourth thing about “Le Bonheur” is Varda’s framing of its simple, triangular love story—of a young carpenter torn between his dressmaker-wife and the postal clerk he begins an affair with—in a specific cultural context. Using posters of pop singers Sylvie Vartan and Georges Brassens, pictures of movie stars, the town-square marquee of all the films playing locally, and references to fashion magazines from which the dressmaker draws her patterns, Varda shows where the media-saturated working-class gets its ideas from. And with a clip from Jean Renoir’s “Picnic in the Grass,” from 1959 (also an erotic romance, also set in a social-scientific context) and visual quotes from films by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, she shows the source of some of her own inspirations as well.
The fifth thing about “Le Bonheur” is its luminous, lighthearted pessimism: happiness is its subject, but, to quote Max Ophüls in “Le Plaisir” (which I discussed in another clip), “Happiness is not cheerful.”
P.S. “Le Bonheur” is among the nineteen features and shorts by Agnès Varda that are currently available to watch, as streaming video, online at Mubi.
