After the shimmering brilliance of her last film, CLEO DE 5 A 7, Agnes Varda's LE BONHEUR is a big disappointment. This time she abandons rich sympathy with her characters in favour of an almost Bressonian detachment and schematism, and a fable-like drive. True, her previous films have had these qualities, but they were infused with the emotional warmth of her protagonists. Fluid camerawork which freed space is replaced by a rigid framing and colour coordination that fixes characters. Still, the film has a rare, if sickly, beauty, and a deeply troubling climax which leaves you not wanting to believe what you've just seen.
The story concerns a carpenter, the provocatively named Francois (the film's fades to red are at one point disrupted by a fade to blue, white and red) with a beautiful wife, Therese, and two children, who go on weekend outings to the country. They seem obsessively happy and content, but one day he meets a telephonist, Emilie, who is about to move into his neighbourhood. They begin an affair, although he insists that he is still passionate about his wife, and that the affair is a conduit for his overflowing happiness. So taken is he with this theory, that he decides to share it with his wife, expecting her approval. He does not get the response he expected.
The ending is so shocking, I think, because of the idyllic happiness (the film's translation) that has preceded it. In fact, its monotony and repetitiveness made the joy oppressive, and Varda takes care from the beginning to undermine it with artifice, not least by overlaying it with one of Mozart's most melancholy late works.
The opening sequence suggests an Eden, as the family loll in perfect happiness in the woods. But in her filming of it, there is none of the Romantic empathy with nature of the Archers (see A CANTERBURY TALE) or King Vidor. One remarkable pan, which blurs the background like a Rorschach test (itself a foretelling of mental collapse), and foregrounds two ominous branches a la Franju (LES YEUX SANS VISAGE), disturbs the paradise for the viewer, as does the lack of communication in the family, the fact that Francois is asleep (is the film his dream?). A relationship based on mere feeling, without communication, can only lead to rupture and misunderstanding.
This opening sequence is cut off from any kind of social or economic reality, such is its dreamlike beauty, so it's a jolt when the family leave for the suburban tower blocks (with an artifice and curious symmetrical beauty of their own). Here the artifice of the earlier scene is compounded by the garden Francois's brother tends, a mini-forest in itself. However, there is no communication here either, as the only personality in the room belongs to the television, offering more constructed ideals about happiness and nature. The relatives seem to have little to say to each other, and leave as soon as they arrive.
This tension permeates the film, even when it professes to merely depict happiness. Therese, even before the affair starts, seems to be the loser, as Francois has a separate space for his work, while she must toil at home as a dressmaker, no division between public and private realms; forced to watch optimistic brides-to-be pass under her roof, while she remains stuck in her unperceived hell. The difference between the two workplaces (rigidly gender specific) offers the first separation, and makes Francois's affair seem inevitable.
Although he claims to still love his wife, the affair offers Francois everything he lacks - a site where he can talk about his feelings, and where he can get uninhibited sexual satisfaction (he compares Emilie to a wild animal, his wife to a meadow, which makes the pastoral idyll all the more violently ironic). Varda mocks the French tendency towards compartmentalisation for convenience here, and comically undercuts the relationship: first with some hilariously rapid shot/reverse shot editing when Francois arrives at Emilie's flat the first time; secondly, in a remarkably extended post-coital scene, after a distanced and fragmentary love scene, which reveals alienation, even when the couple most profess their love.
The ending is terrifying, but also satiric, as it reveals that the family unit as celebrated by de Gaulle is an abstract end in itself, with an icy indifference to the feelings of individuals, shown in the film's repulsive final image of colour-coded conformity. The speed with which conservative ideology co-opts difference and subversion is chilling - the wayward mistress becomes a wife and mother with disturbing ease; we see the process of socialisation and feminisation with lucidity and barely suppressed anger. Modern France has as much emphasis on medieval rites as the fishing village in Varda's debut, LE POINTE COURTE, with its dances and work environments.
Sometimes Varda does allow us access to her characters, as when Francois and Emilie have coffee at the beginning of their affair, but mostly, coldly, shows them as trapped pawns in an amoral, repressive system, in which only witless men thrive. The pastels are ravishing to look at, but unemotional; their poverty of feeling reflects the subject matter. The knowledge that Varda cast a real family in the lead roles only adds to the film's eerie power.
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