If there’s one kind of first film I love watching above all others, it’s the first color movie by a director previously confined to black and white. Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis, Powell & Pressburger’s The Thief of Baghdad, and Akira Kurosawa’s Dodes'ka-den are colorful extravaganzas by directors who, though already well-respected for their monochrome movies, will master this new filmmaking tool. The film is even better when that director, like the aforementioned Kurosawa or our director of the month Agnes Varda, is an artist. Le Bonheur is not Agnes Varda’s best film. It’s not even her best film of the 1960s. But if you want to witness an hour and a half of experimentation with how color reflects and refracts a movie’s theme, then Le Bonheur is the film you want to watch.
For a brightly-colored movie with the title “Happiness,” Le Bonheur is remarkably cruel. Perhaps this accounts for its reputation as one of Agnes Varda’s most controversial movies. Or perhaps it is because, after the empathetic female-centric Cleo from 5 to 7, Varda chose to tell a story about a man who treats the women in his life so poorly. François Chevalier (Jean-Claude Drouot) is a carefree carpenter living in idyllic marital bliss with his wife, Thérèse (Claire Drouot), and their two children. When François meets a new postal worker named Émilie (Marie-France Boyer), he falls immediately into love with her as well. The majority of the film is spent following François from his wife to his mistress and back again, as he guiltlessly and guilelessly adds to his happiness by spending time with each woman. When François finally tells his wife, her reaction is surprising and tragic.
What’s more surprising, though, is how little her tragedy means to the conclusion of the story. Since its release in 1965, Le Bonheur has been subject to many different interpretations by critics, however, Varda’s use of color commentary - of color as commentary - spells out her intent. [More...]
Le Bonheur is an unrealistically brightly colored movie.
Varda creates perfect complementary color compositions - for instance, if a wall is painted powder blue, there will be purple & gold flowers on the table and a woman wearing a green dress. White walls likewise demand white petaled daisies in the atrium and white sheets for the bed. Exteriors are similarly halcyon and contrived. François constantly repeats how he loves nature, and that is because nature is tamed to his whim - when he wears red, he stands against a warm background of golden sunflowers. When he wears pale green, it’s in the mossy shade of emerald trees. When such carefully detailed color compositions emerge from a woman whose style only a decade previously had been described as “documentary-like,” the eye-catching artificiality must be deliberate.
This is a world that operates around François’s whims. Everything, from the women he sleeps with to the gardens he walks through, bends visually to François. Though the film does not condemn François outright for his shabby treatment of his wife and mistress, it does show how little they mean to him by constantly highlighting their similarities visually - both are blonde, both are short, and eventually both wear similar colors and speak similar lines. François’s happiness, then, is a shallow one. As pretty and fake as the world around him.This picture-postcard Paris suburb, unlike the real streets of France that Varda had previously filmed, is meant to be taken as fiction. Paris may be the city of lovers, but Agnes Varda’s film pokes fun at the French stereotypes of the menage a trois.
Early in her career as a filmmaker, Varda had a habit of taking one element of filmmaking per movie and dissecting it. She experimented with time in Cleo from 5 to 7, genre in La Pointe Courte, and color in Le Bonheur. These experiments made her famous, but also allowed her as a filmmaker to improve, having learned how each tool could be used. With this in mind, for our final film of Agnes Varda month, we will jump forward in time, to a genre we haven’t covered yet, but which remained close to Varda’s heart: the documentary.
Coming up on Women's Pictures...
6/25 - The Gleaners + I (2000) - Jumping forward in time and away in genre, this documentary was Varda's exploration of poverty in rural France. (Amazon Prime)