Le Bonheur (dir. Agnès Varda, 1965) - EveryFilmIWatch Review

Le Bonheur is a family drama from the legendary (and sadly, as of not long ago, late) French director Agnès Varda. It’s a subtle film that handles interpersonal relationships with restraint. Ultimately it presents a realistic interpretation of how people deal with drama, which, whilst not unemotional, is usually through enormous degrees of suppression. In terms of context, the film is laterally related to the French New Wave, which was swelling at the time of its release. It shares that movement's taste for a stripped back and realistic handling of interpersonal dynamics and behaviour, but it’s constructed with more attention to form than the work of the likes of Godard and Truffaut.

Varda's status as one of a few isolated female voices in French cinema, cinema globally even, encourages the viewer to explore the complex gendered sexual narrative seeping through the film's polished surface. Broadly speaking, the film tells the story of a young and beautiful family that finds itself blessed with a great deal of bonheur. Despite the family's happiness, the husband embarks on an affair, one which he rather brazenly explains to his wife shouldn’t affect their marriage. Naturally it does - but not necessarily in the ways one might expect.

Varda's film expertly identifies the difference in dedication to happiness versus dedication to the vestiges of happiness and what that crucial difference implies about the human capacity to exercise selective reasoning and judgement. It’s photographed beautifully and has such charming depictions of the happy and youthful couple that you almost forget that there’s anything looming. The few foreboding facets are Varda's mesmerizingly repetitive use of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet coupled with a visual obsession with natural beauty, the sort which begins tastefully but eventually becomes sickly - dizzying even. Varda demonstrates her immense talent and dexterity, constructing an alluring, delicate, meringue-like exterior for a film filled with bitter and suffocating ruminations on gender and society.

EveryFilmIWatch is multi-channel film review project run by Sebastian Cox, ScriptUp co-founder. Further reviews can be found on Instagram.