Agnes Varda and Le Bonheur
...the film has grown away from me even though its topic remains true (what does one do about the other’s desire?) and its treatment fits the storytelling (with different color pallettes); but I feel I have dropped a bouquet of flowers somewhere, then turned around and walked away.
Agnes Varda commenting on Le Bonheur in 2006
Last (wo)man standing
Agnes Varda died this year (2019). In her penultimate film, the documentary Visages Villages (2017), released in English as Faces/Places, the elderly filmmaker travels through France with an artist named JR. This man makes photo-murals and, then, posts them on landmarks in the small villages that the couple visit. Of course, it’s an “odd couple” movie – Varda is nearly 90 and losing her vision. (She endures several injections into her eyes during the movie). JR is forty-five years younger, but they seem to be kindred spirits in a way.
At one point, Varda wagers with the terminally hip JR that she can get him to remove his glasses. She recalls a short film that she made almost 60 years earlier in which she prevailed upon Jean-Luc Godard to remove his trademark sunglasses, revealing what Varda calls his “sad eyes.” This anecdote leads the couple to embark on a trip to see the reclusive Godard at the village on Lake Geneva, Rolle, where he lives in Switzerland. After many adventures, the two reach Rolle. Godard refuses to meet with Varda, despite his earlier promise. Instead, he leaves a message written in scribbled magic marker on a note taped to the door of his home office suite. Godard says that he doesn’t want to traduce the memories of a happier day when Godard with his wife, Anna Karenina, vacationed in Nice with Jacques Demy and his new wife, Agnes Varda. (For several years, the foursome had been meeting each Sunday for breakfast.) Varda is very hurt that Godard has refused to see her. She calls him a “dirty rat.” Later, she tricks JR into removing his sunglasses.
Agnes Varda is the sole female member of a group of celebrated filmmakers who came of age in the late fifties and founded the cinema movement known as the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). Francois Truffaut was the first to die – he was killed by a brain tumor in 1984. Jacques Demy, Varda’s husband, died in 1990 after a thirty year marriage. (Varda made a documentary about her film maker husband called Jacquot de Nantes in 1991). Louis Malle died in 1995 in Beverly Hills. (He is the director of the 1964 film Viva Maria! a comedy starring Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve – this is the film that the couple discuss attending in Le Bonheur.) Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer died in 2010. Jacques Rivette, the great theoretician of the New Wave, died in 2016. This left surviving Jean Luc Godard and Agnes Varda. Varda is now dead, leaving the famously reclusive Godard, as the sole survivor of the Nouvelle Vague. Godard is still active – he released a film The Book of Images earlier this year.
Biography
Agnes Varda was born in 1928 in Brussels to middle class parents. She died at 90 on March 29, 2019. Varda’s father was an engineer. Her mother was a Greek immigrant to Belgium. After the war, she studied psychology at the Sorbonnes and, then, learned still photography at the Ecole du Louvre. She didn’t like Paris as a young woman and describes the city as cold and unfriendly.
In 1954, she received an inheritance and borrowed some money from her mother to make her first feature film, the movie is the semi-documentary La Pointe Courte, a film about a fishing village on the Normandy coast. (Another New Wave luminary, Alain Resnais edited the film – Resnais, most famous for Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad died in March 2014.) The movie was a critical success and is now regarded as the first true example of New Wave cinema. But the picture lost money and Varda was not able to make another full-length movie until Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961). The movie about a young woman whiling away two hours while she waits for the results of a test for breast cancer is universally acclaimed and thought to be one of the best and most distinctive pictures made during the first flush of the New Wave. (Between 1954 and 1961, Varda had been supporting herself largely through still photography in the form of photo-journalism and wedding work.) Varda married Jacques Demy in 1961. (She remained married to the French filmmaker – he specialized in musicals – until his death in 1990.) She wrote and shot Le Bonheur in 1964. The movie is disturbing on many levels and wasn’t financially successful – but it established Varda as an uncompromising feminist film maker.
Varda turned to documentary film with her contribution to the highly political anti-war picture Far from Vietnam (1967). When her husband was hired to make an American film, Model Shop, she moved to Los Angeles. In Hollywood, Varda made no less than seven documentaries on various subjects – one of them is about the Black Panthers. She socialized with Andy Warhol and Dennis Hopper and enjoyed herself thoroughly. The most well-known of these films is Mur Murs (“The Wall Whispers”) about the murals painted along the boardwalk at Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Returning to France to raise her two children, she remained, more or less, out of sight until she released one of cinema’s quintessential feminist films One Sings, the Other does not (1977) – a movie about two women whose lives take very different forms. (The year before she made an effective documentary about the people living around her apartment on the Rue Daguerre – Daguerrotypes.) Critics have contested the question of whether Agnes Varda is properly considered a feminist film maker. Certainly, she considered herself in that category. Some feminists have rejected that description. Claire Johnston declares that Varda is a “reactionary and certainly not a feminist.” She was next celebrated for the harrowing Vagabond (1985), a film about an aimless female clochard. The movie was shot along the Normandy coastline (Herault) during a bitterly cold winter – the film begins with female beggar’s body frozen stiff in a highway ditch. The picture features an astonishing performance by Sandrine Bonnaire. I saw the picture in a theater and recall the movie as a wrenching experience.
Varda continued working on films with difficult subjects. Her 1987 picture Kung Fu Master is about a woman who falls in love with a teenage boy. (Jane Birkin plays the woman – and appears in several documentaries that Varda made simultaneously, including one about Birkin herself.) An interesting aspect of the film is that Varda casts her son, Mathieu Demy, as the teenage boy. Jane Birkin’s two children, daughters Charlotte Gainsborough (later famous for her work with Lars von Trier) and Lou Doillon, play Demy’s siblings in the movie.
Jacques Demy died in 1990 – Varda celebrated his life in three documentaries. Her later films are all non-fiction. (She also wrote an excellent autobiography Varda by Agnes, published 1994, and, apparently, partially filmed as her last picture in 2018.) The Gleaners and I (2000) is an excellent documentary about people who live by foraging their food – it is tough-minded, politically astute, and compassionate. (A quote from the movie: “To bend down is not to beg.”) The Beaches of Agnes (2008) commemorates her happy memories of the beaches in Los Angeles and her life-long interest in the sea-coast and people who work at sea. In her eighties, she traveled the world conducting master classes in film making and devising museum installations incorporating aspects of her films. She worked with the mural-maker and photographer JR in Faces/Places (2017). Varda received a Governor’s Award at the Oscars in 2017. She told a German interviewer that she had spent her life as “a little queen on the outskirts of cinema.” She completed a final documentary in 2018, Varda by Agnes debuted at the Berlin Film Festival. The film uses clips from her movies to survey her life as a film maker.
A month before she died, Agnes Varda was planning to fly to Abu Dhabi to conduct a master class in film making with Saudi Arabian women. A diagnosis of late stage breast cancer caused her to cancel the class. She is buried in Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.
I have not seen any photographs of her other than images in which seems either fantastically alert and engaged or exceedingly happy. Even when Godard stands her up in Faces/Places she’s teary only for a few seconds and, then, immediately cheers up.
Resonances
Varda’s films, often, seem resonant with mythic themes. This effect is curiously elusive. Varda doesn’t overtly allude to mythology or archetypal psychology. But aspects of her more important, and thoroughly realized, films feel embedded in ancient structures of meaning. In Cleo from 5 to 7, the viewer accompanies a beautiful woman as she wanders through a maze. The maze is comprised of the streets and parks and public monuments of Paris. As the film progresses, the woman, who is about to learn whether she will live or die, encounters becalmed landscapes that imply the Underworld – a mortuary pall hangs over some aspects of the woman’s wanderings. The person watching the film may feel that he or she is a witness to some rite of passage, an occurrence akin to Persephone’s abduction by Hades into the underworld. So, similarly, Vagabond invokes primitive rituals – at one point, masked men surge around the outcast woman and threaten her. The protagonist is also trapped in a funereal maze that can lead only to her death.
It’s hard to characterize the sense of foreboding and gathering doom that lurks within the brightly colored images of Le Bonheur – something, it seems, is about to happen that is decreed and that has always happened. The cruelty of Le Bonheur, intrinsic to the narrative, is that the pleasures of nature and, even, love are indifferent to human beings – after the young woman has drowned, the world remains as beautiful as it was before. There is an order of meaning in reality, encoded by bright colors, that is radiant, gives pleasure, and that doesn’t care whether we live or die. Mozart’s music is abstractly beautiful – it gives pleasure but doesn’t console. The autumnal woods at the end of the film is elegiac. Nature revives and dies – human beings vanish and are gone for ever.
The film suggests, but doesn’t explicitly cite, two similarly mythic sources: Vertigo and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (from which the Hitchcock film derives in some ways.) When the first little blonde woman dies in Le Bonheur, her husband stoops to pick her up, hoping, like Orpheus it seems, to revive her – his gesture of bending toward his wife’s inert body repeats, gets caught in a loop. The repetition of the image has a twofold effect: it sears the picture of the dead woman and her hapless husband into our memory, creating a painfully indelible effect, but, also, suggests a repeated effort at resuscitation, at reviving or retrieving the dead woman from the darkness into which she has fallen. In Vertigo, the plot seems absurd because it is mythic, less a matter of film noir or a crime picture, and more an aspect of a cruel and inhuman legend. A man loves and, then, through his negligence, loses the woman that he loves. Unable to bear her loss, the man reconstitutes the woman, recreates her out of the flesh of another woman. When his creation is complete, he is doomed to lose her again. Francois loses Therese. But Emilie is her double in some respects, comes to fill her role in his life, and revives, as it were, the dead Therese. This resurrection is temporary – the woods in which the family wander at the film’s end reeks of mortality.
Orpheus loved Eurydice, his young wife, with all his heart. One day, when Eurydice strolled along the river, a viper bit her and she died. Orpheus, then, sang so sweetly that Death was charmed and allowed the hero to enter the Underworld to retrieve his wife. (There was one condition: he could not look at her until the couple had reached the sunshine and breeze of the world of the living.) Orpheus finds Eurydice and takes her hand to lead her from the realm of shades. But he can’t resist looking at her – or she is vain and demands that he gaze upon her – and the spell is broken: Eurydice turns sadly and retreats, following the winding path back to Dis. In some versions of this myth, Eurydice is snake-bitten because Aristaeus, the demi-god who invented beekeeping and many other useful arts, saw the young woman, desired her, and pursued her along the fragrant path by the river. The handy Francoise with his tools and his skill at making houses, a carpenter, is a bit like Aristaeus.
In other versions of the story, most importantly the narrative that Plato provides in his Symposium, Orpheus is negligent – his indifference drives Eurydice away from him and, so, she is fatally injured. Orpheus is impious in descending into Hades to retrieve the young woman – he violates the laws of God and nature. Plato puts the blame for Eurydice’s death on Orpheus and condemns his attempt to resurrect her from the dead as wicked and irreligious.
Cinecriture
Varda characterized herself as practicing something called “Cinecriture” – she had a life-long love of puns and portmanteau words. Cinecriture means Cine-writing. In the words, she expresses the notion that she is not so much a director as one who uses cinema as a means “to write”.
Le Bonheur
The film critic Isabel Stevens characterizes Le Bonheur as “caustic, strange, and claustrophobic.” Happiness exists only to be inevitably dashed into pieces. The film’s tight ensemble of actors is closely observed – there is no escape from the destiny that the film proposes.
The four family members who appear in the film are not necessarily acting – or, at least, not acting all of the time. They are, in fact, members of a family. Francois is played by Jean-Claude Drouot. His wife, Claire, plays Therese, and the two children are siblings, Sandrine and Olivier Drouot. The movie was shot in a southwest Paris suburb Fontenay-aux-Roses. Documentary elements pervade the film, including the use of bystanders as extras – in 1971, Varda made a fiction film called Documenteur – a pun that could be translated “Docu-lie”. The film raises the question as to what extent it is a “Docu-lie?”
Vincennes where the hero travels and where he meets his girlfriend, Emilie, is only about 10 miles from Fontenay-aux-Roses where the family lives. The movie seems to suggest that this is a significant distance for the character to travel– but, of course, Vincennes is closer to Fontenay-aux-Roses than Albert Lea is to Austin.
In one scene, the characters are shown watching TV – the program is a broadcast of Jean Renoir’s late film Dejeuner sur l’Herb (“Picnic on the Grass”), released in 1959. The movie involves a young woman who wishes to have a child, but dislikes men. She contacts a eugenicist who offers to arrange for her artificial insemination. There’s a picnic, a bit similar to that shown in Manet’s famous painting (although without the naked woman) and, when a mistral suddenly blows out of nowhere, the violent storm has the effect of forcing the characters into uncomfortably close and intimate contact. The intervention of the storm is similar to the tempest that intervenes in Renoir’s most lyrical film A Day n the Country (1936). Throughout Le Bonheur, Varda refers her imagery to the great Impressionist masters – most particularly Auguste Renoir (Jean Renoir’s father).
Varda encodes the film with curious motifs – I’m not sure if these are symbolic or simply graphic elements that provide for the film a visual structure. Francois works making cabinets and furniture – he is a skilled craftsman employed in a family business. He is associated with wood. At one point, someone says that “(Francoise) smells of wood.” Francois is building a playhouse for the children. The film’s domestic architecture is loving detailed – this, perhaps, explains the enclosed or, as some note, “claustrophobic” aspect of the movie. Notice how Emilie stacks sticks to create a sort of house – or, at least, what she calls a house in the end of the film. This activity, nesting or home-building, seems to rhyme with the carefully constructed shelter in which the small children nap when their parents make love in the park. The essence of the domestic is shelter and the film indexes various types of shelter – the empty apartment to which Emilie movies, the confined phone booths in the post office, and, of course, the home in which Francois and Therese live.
Another significant visual rhyme is the film’s graphic scheme is the saw dust produced in the furniture shop. In several scenes, the amount of sawdust shown in the shot seems surreal – there can’t possibly be waist-high heaps of the stuff lying around. I think the huge piles of sawdust are intended the visually correlate with the pile of similarly brown colored dirt heaped up next to Therese’s grave in the funeral scene. The reduction of trees or wood to sawdust seems metaphorically related to Therese’s drowning and the way that she is discarded (and replaced) by the film’s narrative.
Throughout the film, the two women are shot so as to emphasize their physical similarity. In the sex scenes, it’s not always immediately clear who is bed with Francois. Some critics have uncharitably compared Emilie and Therese to the Stepford wives, indistinguishable female clones, perfectly contrived and submissive to the pleasure of the male protagonist.
In general, Vardas narrative technique is elliptical and parametric. The most startling example of parametric staging may be found in the dance scenes. Varda shows the women dancing with various partners including Francois at the same tavern – the shots are designed to look like Renoir paintings. However, she movies the camera rhythmically back and forth across the fulcrum of a tree – the tree is cognate with wood and, therefore, seems to designate Francois (the worker in raw wood) as a central body between the two women. Similar effects mirror the abstract graphic design embodied in the film’s opening – the alternation between the three sunflowers and the single sunflower.
The movie is shot in luminous Eastmancolor with densely saturated colors. The only film that I know that features fades to some color other than black is Bergman’s Cries and Whispers in which the shots fade to red. Varda, however, uses a number of colors for the fades in her picture. In classical film-making, the audience is not supposed to really notice a fade to black – it’s a kind of punctuation but one to which viewers are acclimated by habit and don’t typically notice. Varda though wants the viewer to notice the fades – she wants the viewer to grasp that the movie is making an elision between different times and locations. The colored fade-out, therefore, foregrounds an element of film grammar that we would not ordinarily notice and draws our attention to the surface (graphic) characteristics of the movie – the rhythm of its cutting, the carefully designed fields of color found on hoardings and advertisements, the disposition of colors within a composition, all of these things are integral to Varda’s design.
A Quote
I will respond with other formulas: “Happiness is mistaken sadness and the film will be subversive in its great sweetness. It will be a beautiful summer fruit – an exquisitely colored peach – with a worm inside. Happiness adds up, torment does too. “Happiness is not gay.” These are the words we hear at the end Max Ophuls Le Plaisir.
Agnes Varda on Le Bonheur (1965)
A Painting by Magritte
Agnes Varda once compared her marriage to Jacques Demy to a famous painting by Rene Magritte. In that painting, two lovers with their heads swathed in burlap sacks attempt to kiss – the painting is called Les Amants. Varda says that as time passed, the two lovers drew apart and removed the sacks covering their heads, that is, overcame their willful and self-imposed ignorance about their partners.
Demy was, apparently, gay. He died of AIDS.
Varda never acknowledged this publicly, although, most likely, everyone knew this to be the fact. One year before Demy died, his lover had succumbed to AIDS, and so the film maker’s death was a foregone conclusion.
Varda obviously loved Demy without reservation. (The imagery and colorful fade-outs in Le Bonheur seem to refer to the super-saturated color films that Demy was making at the same time – 1964 was the year he directed and released The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, his most famous musical.) Varda’s devotion to Demy is demonstrated by the three documentaries she made about his life after he died. Varda also was a staunch advocate for the restoration and reconsideration of Demy’s films. Probably, on the basis of her advocacy, Demy has enjoyed a recent resurgence of fame, particularly with respect to his later films, some of which can be read as “queer.”
Does this information affect how we view Le Bonheur?
An Infernal Machine
Some works of art raise grave and insoluble problems as to morality and ethics. Ultimately, these works illustrate dilemmas that arise in the context of justice. As you will recall from our study of Plato’s Republic, questions relating to justice are particularly intractable – what is justice? who is entitled to justice? how should justice be administered? Ultimately, these issues seem insoluble, at least, when considered in abstract terms or isolated from the facts of particular cases. (The fact that we can’t reliably answer questions relating to justice suggest that this is something wrong with the premises upon which these questions are posed. Justice itself, although a concept fundamental and, perhaps, definitive to human nature, may well be something that doesn’t exist in any stable form and that can not be effectively defined.)
Examples of art works that raise particularly insoluble interpretative questions are Melville’s Billy Budd on the subject of crime and punishment, Sophocles Antigone (on rights and religious duty), Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (about the relationship between a man and his community) and the exceptionally simple and straightforward Le Bonheur, a movie with a plot that could be comfortable inscribed on a matchbox cover but that poses questions of abysmal and unsettling profundity. These works are characterized by viewpoints that are incommensurate but each fundamentally possessing an indisputable claim of rectitude. Tragedy is not the clash between good and evil. Tragedy is the clash between one thing that is indisputably good and another thing equally good – the only arbiter of such a conflict is justice and Plato demonstrates that we don’t what justice is. Works of art successfully devised to embody these sorts of irreconcilable conflicts are both perfect and, also, infernal machines.
Le Bonheur dramatizes tragic conflicts that arise in the context of romantic love. If I truly love you, then, my love is unconditional. An aspect of unconditional love is that I must desire that you be happy. Therefore, I am arguably (and all of these propositions are debatable) obliged to desire unconditionally your happiness. Your happiness, you may assert, will not be complete unless you can enjoy a sexual liaison with another. Let’s posit, for a moment, that this liaison will not decrease your love for me but will merely add happiness to happiness. Do you have the right to say simultaneously that you love me wholly and unconditionally and, yet, deny me something that will add to my happiness? Immediately, complex issues of justice arise. Now, you may wish to deny the dilemma – you may say that having this sexual liaison will not add to your happiness, but will instead be a source of sorrow. But, if you make this claim, then, we must ask why will the sexual liaison be a cause of sorrow? If it’s because you will be angry with me and treat me harshly, then, perhaps, you don’t really love me as fully as you profess. If it’s because you think that my happiness will not be real with the other person, you are substituting your judgement for mine. By what right, do you substitute your judgement for my judgement? Would you agree that I substitute my judgement for yours and make decisions for me? Presuming you would not agree that I make decisions on your behalf, then, it seems that you can’t make decisions for me as to what constitutes my true happiness and the best means of pursuing that happiness.
These questions are particularly poignant for Americans, unique in the world, because our founding documents guarantee us the “pursuit of happiness.” Am I allowed to pursue happiness if it causes you pain?
Le Bonheur is also disturbing in that implies an order of meaning that is wholly amoral and indifferent to questions of justice. Mozart’s music as it underlies the film doesn’t judge – it draws no moral and suggests no ethic. The film’s brilliant colors, carefully deployed by Varda, into a graphic compositions that are exceptionally beautiful don’t propound any moral truths except, perhaps, the most abstract – light is beautiful and living things thrive on light and the glory of light is intrinsic to the pleasures of sight and vision. We may turn to these beautiful things for solace and, indeed, they may suggest to us the Epicurean principle that the only true thing in the world is pleasure and that only fools don’t live for pleasure. This notion is attractive but where does it lead? The aesthetic pleasures of the eyes and ears are quickly indistinguishable from bodily pleasures. And if bodily pleasures are intrinsic to living well, then, by what justice would we deny ourselves or a loved one the right to pursue physical (carnal) pleasure.? Note that the film’s idyllic beauty is abstract in many respects – the camera cuts between one sunflower and three sunflowers, all of them slightly wilted, and, in the background, we see four humans approaching – father, mother, and two children. Three plus one = four. But who are the three and who is isolated as the fourth? Can we add the one sunflower to the other to equate them to the foursome in the family? Are joys and pleasures purely additive as Francois contends? Therese is last glimpsed (by the bystanders) engaged in a aesthetic act – she is picking flowers. This is for several reasons. Following my mythic interpretation of the film, Therese is like Eurydice who is like Persephone, as Milton tells us, “picking flowers, herself the fairest flower” to be picked by the gloomy Lord of Hades. But, on another level, the characters in Le Bonheur are most happy when enjoying beautiful things and, so, it is not surprising that Therese would seek to assuage her sorrow or confusion by gathering flowers in the moments before she drowns. Perhaps, she slips into the stream while reaching for a particularly beautiful and remote blossom; perhaps, her pursuit of beauty causes her to be lost. We don’t know and it’s certainly not clear that she has committed suicide – indeed, the film shows her in a brief, almost subliminal, shot trying to pull herself out of the water. Life is too beautiful to be simply cast away. We must imagine that in her final instants, Therese desired to live among the beautiful things that the film shows and tried to save herself from the consuming waters.
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