Le Bonheur (Happiness)
The story of happiness as industrial process. That might have been too gnomic, but this is a gnomic film. It is the third film directed by Agnès Varda and her first in color, and it feels like the first film ever directed in color. Color bursts forth as if unpent; at times the film’s passion for color is so intense that the screen saturates to a single clogged block of hue.
The story approaches anti-story, without fully indulging. We open on François and Thérèse, a couple, and their two young children, picnicking amidst the pastel muddle of grass and flowers that typifies the European arcadia. François and Thérèse are beautiful and in love, and exude so much health as to seem overripe - and indeed there are signs of bruising that would have been glossed over in a film that meant to play all of this completely straight. In an early shot we see a large scab over Thérèse’s right kneecap; a few minutes later grass stains across the seat of François’s pants; much later when François is in bed with his lover Émilie the scar from a smallpox vaccine dimples her arm.
But the bit about the lover takes quite a while to develop. We begin by drifting along with François and Thérèse, played by real-life married couple Jean-Claude and Claire Druout (in her only film appearance). The children are really theirs, too. François and Thérèse live in a distant suburb of Paris, where the countryside only just gives out; when they return from that Edenic picnic there is a shot that follows their van as it drives past a boxy housing development set within forest and flowers, and the effect of these prettily meshed opposing forces – shades of Peaceable Kingdom – suggests the softened edges of a fairytale. The touch of fairytale lingers. François is a woodsman (a carpenter) and Thérèse a seamstress, and they live together in a cozy cottage that is also a rowhouse, filling their days with work and children, and making the rounds among a benign extended family.
Given the film’s title, we are primed to look for happiness, and primed to be suspicious of it when we see it (I’m not sure what a film should call itself if it wants us to take the happiness of its characters at face value). The happiness on display is of an obvious sort: day to day conjugal bliss, ornamented by children who, as Amy Taubin notes in her excellent essay, are happy to nap on demand. As for our suspicions, they quickly settle on François – although perhaps they are meant to settle more generally on the male specimen. At one point, we see a clip on TV taken from Renoir’s Picnic on the Grass (hat tip again to Tobin, and to Richard Brody as well), in which that film’s Great Man professor is asked by a young woman to talk – simply to talk, she loves to hear him talk. He begins to bloviate; Varda cuts him off.
We often see François on the run. He doesn't run gracefully, rather heedlessly. He enters into his affair the same way. Émilie is a postal worker, whose personality is slightly sharper than that of the gauzy Thérèse; but she still appears to us largely through her interest in François. He being narrow, our aperture into her personality is narrow. He courts her with dialogue that is extremely - and knowingly - stupid, and it was with this sequence that I began to see François as potentially a dangerous man.
The affair progresses for two months, enough to take us to the end of summer. Here we come to a breathless, menacingly hushed scene. The family return to their picnic spot, and after eating the children are again ushered to their nap (they nap under insect netting, and the way in which they submit so calmly to being packed away under the ghostly stuff panged me somehow). Alone with Thérèse, François confesses his infidelity and begs for her understanding: his capacity for happiness is simply too great to be satisfied by her alone. It is as if, he says, he has more than the usual number of arms - he needs more people to hug. In the simplicity and pure need of his self-presentation, François here reminds me, oddly, of Peter Stormare’s Gaear Grimsrud, from Fargo. Gaear is a man with all of his wiring torn out; he does whatever is least inconvenient, up to murder. François is a man with all of his wires plugged in. The surface of his happiness is flat at one-hundred percent, and offers no purchase for others to make a claim on him. If Thérèse were to reject him - to tell him to go to hell, as Varda has said she herself would have done - we feel that he might easily murder her, and perhaps the sleeping children too. If they cannot be a part of his happiness, then their reality is questionable.
Thérèse however excepts her position as a happiness tributary, or seems to, or does and then changes her mind. After making love with Franoçis, she jumps in a lake and drowns. Soon after it is autumn. François has married Émilie, who seamlessly takes over Thérèse’s role as companion and mother (this will be a long digression, but: the sequence where Emilie takes over for the deceased Therese is very similar to a sequence in the 2006 comedy Beerfest, in which a man who drowns in a vat of beer is replaced by his twin brother, allowing the plot to roll forward as if the death had never occurred (yes, yes, weird sentence). It’s a funny bit, with a disturbing bite - we aren’t that special, no one would mourn our death if it weren’t for the trouble of replacing us - and it has stuck with me for years. It was disorienting to see it echoed here, with the ratios of comedy and nihilism inverted). As the film ends we see the reconstituted family plunging again into the countryside, exploring a new autumn palette as from the soundtrack tense violins scold them.
This is a short film, with a light style. Varda comes off as someone who is proceeding catch-as-catch-can while thinking very hard. She tells many stories, sometimes with a single medium-length shot, sometimes with an imagic rat-a-tat-tat; she likes to drift with a character’s thoughts. When François passes by a zoo, we see footage of zoo animals. When he holds Thérèse’s dead body, we see her making a single, sharp, ambiguous gesture as she enters the water. In fact, as viewers we can’t be certain that her drowning was intentional. But in an interview conducted forty or so years after Bonheur’s filming, Claire Druout, still happily married to Jean-Claude, says that in her mind there can be no doubt that it was suicide.
