Le Bonheur (1965)
Directed by Agnès Varda

Film Review

Agnès Varda's third film (and her first colour film) provoked something of a scandal when it was first released in France, at the height of the sexual revolution in the mid-1960s.  What was so shocking about the film was not so much its subject but the way in which Varda approaches it, in a way that suggests a kind of moral equivalence between love in a stable marriage and love in an adulterous relationship.  The film can be interpreted as an invitation to free love, even implying that the lives of married couples can only be improved by an extra-marital affair or two.

Le Bonheur is actually a far more subtle film than this, and indeed it is one of the most ironic and truthful portrayals of romantic love in French cinema.  The film doesn't celebrate open relationships, as its detractors claimed, but merely observes that marital infidelity is an inevitable fact of life.  It also reminds us that there is no so such thing as the perfect love affair.  Whilst we may all wish to believe in an amorous felicity that is strong enough to last a lifetime, the reality is that few of us will ever find anything approaching it.  Love is by its nature a thing of transience.  Like a golden summer it comes and goes, leaving bittersweet memories and a heart that aches with a tender sorrow for a thing found and lost.  If it were not so, we would not prize love so highly.

Ironically, the film ends as it begins - with the most gorgeously framed sunny portrait of the perfect family, the ideal that we all aspire to.  From a distance, we might even think it was the same family; it is as though nothing has changed in the intervening time.  But, by watching the film, we see how wrong this surface impression is.  Love has come and gone, individuals have been marked and changed by their experiences.   Yet the course of life continues, a stream that will flow where it will, guiding our passions through vistas tinged with joy and grief, but never once allowing us to arrive at the perfection that we crave.

Film Synopsis

François has an idyllic life and cannot imagine how he could be happier.  He enjoys working as a carpenter with his older brother.  He and his wife Thérèse form the perfect married couple, deeply in love, and blessed with two adorable young children.  Then, one day, François falls in love for a second time.  He knows he is in love the moment he sets eyes on Émilie, a post office employee.  And she is just as in love with him.  François's affair with Émilie merely adds to his happiness.  He still loves Thérèse but somehow his life is richer, more complete, now that he has another woman to cherish and share his experiences with.  Too honest to conceal his adultery from his wife, François takes the decision to tell Thérèse everything.  Naively, he believes that he can keep the love of two women.  He could hardly be more mistaken...