Agnes Varda
Agnes Varda
RANKED:
3. Le Bonheur (1965)
Agnes Varda's first color film, 1965's "Le Bonheur," is also perhaps her most visually beautiful film. Everything on the surface looks beautiful, colorful, and happy. In the film, a man is happy living his life with his wonderful and beautiful wife along with his two lovely children. Nothing could make it happier. However, he decides to take on a lover to 'add to his happiness.' However, doing so brings tragic consequences. "Le Bonheur" is considered by many to be Varda's most radical and shocking film. There are some who consider it a horror film wrapped in beautiful and lovely imagery and narrative. It is a film that challenges thought and begs many questions to be answered: is our own chase for happiness inherently selfish? Are we actually happy, or are we superficially happy? And most importantly, does men's pursuit of happiness inherently create conflict with objective harmony and women's sustainability? It becomes all the more unnerving with the film's ending in what it says about fate, love, and role of a woman in a relationship.
2. La Pointe Courte (1955)
Many people consider François Truffaut to be the instigator of the French Nouvelle Vague movement with his 1959 film "The 400 Blows." However, these people would be incorrect. The reality is that Agnes Varda's 1955 film "La Pointe Courte" started this important artistic movement off. The film tells the story of a young married couple walking through the husband's hometown fishing village of 'La Pointe Courte' as they discuss their crumbling relationship. All the while, the film cuts periodically to the fisherman of this village and their families as they live their lives and deal with their domestic responsibilities, trouble with fishing regulations, the death of one of the small children, and their mundane daily tasks. While this section of the film is filmed like a documentary completely tethered to reality, the story of the couple is filmed like an arthouse film (before arthouse was even a type of filmmaking). Varda completely breaks all the rules of filmmaking by not limiting herself to the kind of shots she employs: reflection shots, characters looking directly into camera, characters' faces composed against each other, shots from overhead, shots from down below, and any form of shot you can image. All the while, Varda intermingles realism with fantasy, tangibility with the intangible, the sensory with the abstract, documentary with arthouse, and so on. The effect is a film that is freeform and untethered to conventionality. With this, the Nouvelle Vague is born.
1. Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)
By breaking the doors down to cinema and igniting the French new wave movement with her 1955 debut "La Pointe Courte," Agnes Varda elevated the bar even higher a whole 7 years later with her second feature, "Cleo from 5 to 7." Taking place mostly in 'real time,' the film follows Cleo, a Parisian pop star who begins the film rich, spoiled, and superstitious. As she waits for a critical medical test result, Cleo traverses the city of Paris and starts to reconnect with herself. Her values that were originally tied to beauty and outside appearance starts to break apart, leaving room for rediscovering the parts of herself that hold more human depth. Cleo's journey is not just a feminist odyssey of self-love, but it is also a viewpoint of the contemporary modern individual in the post-war landscape. Full of superficial self-soothing and surface-level glossiness, our modern world leaves no room for actual depth to connect with natural world and ourselves. Through Cleo's 2 hour journey, we too reconnect with important values that extend beyond the beauty and superficiality of our modern world. Hopefully, as Cleo comes to find in the film, we also can rediscover ourselves and our connection to humanity and, along the way, embrace the messier aspects of life and find self-love in the process.
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