I didn’t know much about Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965; title translates as “Happiness”) before I started watching it except for the title credit image of the hetreosexual nuclear family blurred in the distance while a sunflower is in the foreground and noted comparisons to The Stepford Wives. It’s all about Francois (Jean-Claude Drouot) who is a handsome worker happily married to Therese (Claire Drouot) who raises their two happy children. He seems to live a happy existence – but then an affair develops with a post office employee Emilie (Marie-France Boyer). As the movie goes on, you keep waiting for the usual scenes and beats in a story like this – will the affair be discovered? How will he live with the guilt? How will they be reconciled? But, no… From its opening setting of a lush garden plain and forest bathed in golden light, and the carefully designed visual aesthetic throughout, where a character’s dress or shirt might be colour-matched to an interior’s wall or a location’s exterior, everything feels like a television commercial or a soap opera. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop. What is going on here, really? The shoe does drop with a tragic turn and how everything resolves pushes through the film’s critique of gender expectations, specifically male privilege and the era’s attitudes to “free love”. Varda would later say that she saw the film as “a beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside.” Definitely an example where the more I thought about the film, its meaning intensified and the darkness of it has greater impact, even as it exists with a level of ambiguity as a “happy” romantic drama. Recommended.
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