Agnes Varda, the great French film maker, made La Pointe Courte in 1954 on location at Sete, a French city on the Riviera, "La Pointe Courte" names the sector of the town where its fishermen live, a neighborhood of shacks, alleys where women hang laundry to dry, and labyrinths of rotting docks wrapped in nets and seaweed. Varda was only 25 when the movie was completed. Although not completely successful, the film is astonishing from start to finish. Varda grew up without watching movies and she has a uniquely poetic film vocabulary that owes nothing to Hollywood -- the principal governing the film is an aggressive use of montage, cutting together disparate images, but her practice is warm, lush, and not at all theoretical: not only was she ignorant of Hollywood film practice, she also is singularly uninfluenced by Eisenstein's theories of editing. Everything about the movie is fresh and startling.
At the end of her life, Varda describes her first movie as based on Faulkner's Wild Palms, a book that tells two stories that don't really intersect in anyway. Varda's description of her first film appears in her last movie Varda on Varda, a picture premiered in Berlin only a few months before the director's death. In fact, the film seems to tell three stories, although one is only slightly developed. In the first story, a man from the village who has been living in Paris meets his lover and shows her around the tiny, derelict-looking fishing village -- the couple is estranged and both have sought other relationships. The woman is distressed by the village's poverty -- for instance, there is no running water in the shack where the man grew up. After a series of long, philosophically dense dialogues, the man and woman decide to stay together and, after spending a day and night in the village, depart together in the morning on the train to Paris. In the second story, members of the village conspire against the authorities who have accused the fishermen of selling shellfish polluted by some kind of noxious bacteria. This story involves threats by inspectors to close down the fishing operations and belligerent counter-threats made by the fisherman and their formidable wives. In the third story, a father disapproves of a young man who wishes to court his 16-year-old daughter -- in the end, he seems to relent and allows her to dance with the boy at a celebration that takes place after a "jousting tournament" on the grand canal at Sete. There are other smaller and more enigmatic narratives, micro-stories entangled with these three plot strands and the film is visually highly complex, built from passages that have completely different styles and pictorial textures.
The movie begins with exploration of the squalid-looking fishing village -- the camera explores the shacks, the docks and decaying piers, the work sites where people repair boats or sort cockles, the ubiquitous nets hanging from fences and poles, the nearby railroad tracks and seaweed-encrusted beaches, and the harsh-looking industrial sites near the lagoon and channel where the villagers live. The whole place is overrun with a tribe of black cats -- they prowl through about two-thirds of the images in the film and provide a sort of spectral commentary on the action: the cats have a little of the mysterious quality of the felines in a Bonnard canvas. The woman from Paris has a flat, Slavic face -- she's not conventionally pretty but her features have a fine cubist aspect to them. And, in fact, she and her sulking lover are often posed in cubist profile -- a face turned sideways against the other visage filmed from a full frontal perspective. (Bergman uses this type of shot in Persona, but that's about ten years after this movie was made.) The sequences with the lovers have a dreamy highly stylized, almost surreal quality -- it looks like the sort of alienated mise-en-scene that characterizes an Antonioni picture like L'Eclisse or The Red Desert. In fact, some of the shots seem to be templates for sequences in Antonioni films in which disenchanted lovers bicker while wandering through picturesque industrial wastelands. This aspect of the movie is stilted and cold (intentionally so) and the characters speak in elaborate poetry, a bit like actors in a play by Corneille or Racine. I don't think this part of the movie works very well -- it seems pretentious and over-composed, but, when one considers that Varda is pioneering this sort of material (the movie was made ten years before the Antonioni films that it resembles), the technical aspects of the narrative and the boldness with which Varda cuts away to "objective correlatives" to her character's distress in the wasteland through which they wander is truly extraordinary. The scenes involving the fishermen are filmed without condescension and have a raw documentary presence -- Varda doesn't sentimentalize the fishermen and their broods of ragged children. In one shocking scene, we see a fisherman drowning kittens in a bucket of what looks like dirty oil. This is intercut with images of a sick toddler dying -- he lies alone in a room apart from his six dirty-looking siblings, resting in what seems to be an open suitcase. When he dies, an old woman enters the dismal room -- it's like a cave -- and begins to keen. The mother sits stricken next to the dead child. Then, the film cuts percussively to the father slapping a little boy -- the kid has annoyed him in some way, made some rude or inappropriate comment about the death of his brother. Father, then, takes the child to get some licorice. There is a similar "shock cut" after a long dialogue between the lovers. Their speeches reach levels of flowery, poetic rhetoric -- it seems wholly improbable that anyone would speak this way. Then, the film cuts to another adult slapping a little kid hard in face (these shots don't seem to be staged.) It's very confrontational, a harsh comment on the poetry that the lovers are spewing at one another. In the film's last twenty minutes, the tone of the picture again changes radically: we seem to be in Venice, at the Grand Canal where there is aquatic jousting underway. Big galleys full of rowing men sideswipe one another while champions with long lances try to knock one another off the boats. (The defeated men fall in an aerial ballet into the channel.) A big crowd is gathered, thousands of people, it seems. After the jousting tournament, the teams gather in their boat-houses for a celebratory meal -- the women wait outside. Then, there is a dance filmed from overhead. The Parisian lovers push through the dancing crowds on their way to the train station. The girls quarrel with their boyfriends over drowning kittens -- they want, at least, a few of the kittens to be spared. A quartet of old men perform on their musical instruments and the film ends, the action encompassing one day and half of one night. Varda makes no attempt to align her narratives. In fact, she seems to urge a different camera style on each story. The separate narratives create force-fields that radically alter the landscapes in which the plot takes place -- the love story is set in a waste-land, the narrative about the polluted shellfish is filmed against the fishing village portrayed as in a documentary; the young lovers are shot in the midst of warm spaces crowded with carousing people. The only real cross-over between the stories are a few comments made by the fishermen -- one of the fisherman's wives says abruptly of the Parisian lovers: "They talk too much to be happy."
The most extraordinary aspect of La Pointe Courte is Varda's delight in the tactile aspects of the things that she films. The movie is full of textures depicted with fantastic verve and enthusiasm. When the lovers talk about sexual betrayal, the camera seeks out pots and buckets full of nameless filth. When the woman announces she is leaving her boyfriend, a strange locomotive, terribly battered appears in a vacant lot full of weeds and gravel -- the locomotive squeaks and squeals on its wheels as it advances. The camera picks out the slimy texture of eels, the white underbellies of mullets, the appearance of a sandy field all cut and incised with wheel marks from carts and dragged boats, the precise grain of driftwood, the flopping shadows cast by underwear dancing in the mistral wind on a clothes line, the soft fur of cats, a basket casting a filigree shadow on a dusty alleyway, wind blowing through the drying clothes, the slop a mother is feeding to her hungry family, the texture of old sails, rotting wood, rope and canvas. The best scenes in the movie are comparable to Jean Vigo's L'Atalante and this is high praise.
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