LE BONHEUR Movie Review

Happiness

In a picturesque French suburb, a young carpenter named François shares an idyllic existence with his wife, Thérèse, and their two children. When I say idyllic, I mean it; when the family isn't on picnics in the sun-dappled woods near their home, François and Thérèse are making love, usually with Mozart on the soundtrack. My early memories of Agnes Varda's 1965 Le Bonheur (“Happiness”) are centered on this gauzy, dreamy depiction of marriage, which I found intolerably corny in my teen years during the Vietnam era. The fact that François later began an affair with Emilie, a post office clerk, with whom he and the children live happily ever after following the death of his wife, only made the picture seem sillier to me at the time. Fast forward. In 1997, some 30 years after I first saw it, a friend invited me to a screening of a restored color print of Le Bonheur at New York's Museum of Modern Art. My, my. What a difference living a life makes. Not only is this film not the candy-colored, sentimental pabulum that I had remembered, it's the opposite: complex, wise, and darkly, almost breathtakingly subversive. What escaped me as a teen? Everything. For starters, the open, sunny honesty of the married couple's relationship leads to François telling Thérèse of his feelings for Emilie. She tells him that she loves him so much that his happiness is what counts. Right after telling him that, she drowns. (While her death is presented ambiguously, I'm convinced she did herself in.) After what seems like a few minutes of mourning, François does indeed find himself as happy as can be with Emilie, and they go off picnicking, guilt-free and grief-free, with the same Mozart riffs on the soundtrack that we heard at the beginning. The bone-chilling irony of Le Bonheur's ending outdoes the moment in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors in which Martin Landau describes waking up one day—after he sanctions his lover's murder—and feels no guilt whatsoever. That Varda's film is so damned honest only makes it more hair-raising. It's a fairy tale for grown-ups who harbor no illusions whatsoever. As much as any film from its time, Le Bonheur is ripe for fresh look.

NEXT STOP … The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacquot, The Soft Skin

1965 87m/C FR Jean-Claude Drouot, Claire Drouot, Marie-France Boyer; D: Agnes Varda; W: Agnes Varda; C: Jean Rabier, Claude Beausoleil. VHS HMV, FCT