Happiness (1965)

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djross
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Happiness (1965)

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A very successful invitation to reflect, where the ambiguous and mysterious character of what we are shown, through a set of radiantly colourful Rorschach images, develops an uncanny capacity to delight, to disturb, or to enrage, depending on one’s point of view and interpretation. At its heart, it concerns a man who is mostly free from subsistence concerns and is in possession of a sense of the beauty and joy of the cosmos (in particular, a love of nature and work), and the way that a disruption of his cosmos, due to a problem that may or may not have been brought about by the limitations of his own viewpoint, forces upon him the need to ask himself a question, and to find an answer to that question capable of opening a path to a different but positive future.

The filmmaker herself seems to have become uncomfortable with her film, not exactly disavowing it but at least resisting it and reinterpreting it in an increasingly harsh way. In so doing, she seems to end up denying the intention that lay behind the art in a way that nevertheless also seems to unintentionally confirm its power – including over the filmmaker herself – forcing her eventually to react against this resistance and to reaffirm the film’s viewpoint. Consider the four following lengthy quotations from Varda, all extracted from T. Jefferson Kline (ed.), Agnès Varda: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014).

First, an interview from 1967 with Hubert Arnault (pp. 39–40):

I was asked, “Why didn’t you continue to follow their three lives?” But that wasn’t my subject. This isn’t an interesting illustration of what a man’s life would be like with two women. That’s not at all the subject of the film. The subject of the film is really that a guy who is constitutionally drawn to happiness both because of his love of nature and his other aptitudes, and for lack of any outside pressures (whether religious, political, etc.), well, for a character like that, you notice that any person so focused on happiness supposes and requires that he will have to invent some ethical position. It’s a film about the invention of ethics as a moral problem that sooner or later will come up in our relationship with others. It just so happens that in this film the guy pays dearly for his awakening, plus, since his nature is more positive than optimistic he will tend to be pretty logical in the sequence of events that confront him. It’s not because his wife dies that he would give up on happiness or end up unhappy. That’s the attitude of someone with a more negative personality. This is a guy who, when suddenly wounded, thinks that he has to try to continue being happy. It’s really up to the audience to understand this nuance, the difference between his present happiness and the former one. These are nuances, but life is full of nuances. The film presents this particular situation. It should be evident that each spectator must draw his own conclusions and judge the character according to his own personal criteria. That’s perfectly o.k. In any case, the characters who continue into the second part of the film are, in my view, quite courageous. Because, the young woman could cave under the weight of her guilt, and, my God, how many women her age are there who could forge ahead and care for the happiness of two children who are not hers… These characters are very courageous within the limits of their particular problems that are quite restrained, but the characters are nevertheless very brave. People often say, “this woman who commits suicide…” but I find it’s a terrible cowardice to commit suicide when you have two children. You should at least try to resolve your problems before you abandon your kids. It’s too easy, too cowardly a situation. She comes across looking terribly weak. As for me, I avoid making moral judgments about my characters. I feel a great deal of sympathy for the three characters, and I really tried to show them in a particular situation. I wasn’t interested in showing “this one is good, that one is bad”. I tried to show everything that happened in such a way as to leave the viewers free to make their own judgments.
Next, an interview with Jacqueline Levitin from 1974, where this concern with ethical invention is tending to be replaced with a rather retrospective invocation of political imperatives (pp. 58–59):

Can we find a situation in which you do not fool the audience and still entertain them? For example in Le Bonheur I was trying to make the shape of the film so lovely and nice that if you don’t want to face what it means you don’t have to. You can see the film as a beautiful bucolic picnic painting and enjoy it as it is saying, “He’s a little selfish but life goes on.” You can also start to think about what cruelty of Nature means, what is the function of a woman, how can she be replaced so easily – so what is the life of a woman about? Does it mean that ironing and cooking and putting children to bed is enough, and that any blond woman can do it for that man? But you are not obliged to read the film at that level. So I was trying to make a movie clear enough – I was trying, I really didn’t succeed well in Le Bonheur – but my aim was to make a movie entertaining enough so that people could see sort of a love story with a little affair, a little drama, but not too much, a feeling that life can be beautiful, etc., and on another level, if you want to read it, and make up your mind about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, what cruelty it involves if you want to be happy, how someone must pay for you, at what age you can give another mother to children – all these questions can be raised after seeing the film. But it still looks like an entertaining film. That’s what I wanted to do. That’s why it is so smooth – but I overdid it and it’s not really good – I tried to make it like a beautiful apple you want to eat. Because I believe if you make a very serious film to raise consciousness, people leave. Most people go once or twice a week maximum to the movies, and because they are tired and want to forget what their life is most of the time, and they just want to see a lot of nice things, or violent – because they don’t dare to have so much violence in their lives. So one should be clever enough to manipulate the needs of the mass audience but in a way that would not be meaningless and empty.
By 1975, talking to Mireille Amiel, Varda comes close to repudiating the film, twisting her original intention so that it becomes a matter of “exploding” the clichés of happiness that are little more than ideological lures – the director is clearly in conflict with herself about the status of her work from a decade earlier (pp. 75–76):

Le Bonheur is about the suave clichés about happiness vs. the cruel reality of happiness as a cruel structure that organizes everybody’s activities. What really upset a lot of women and even certain feminists was that behind the soft colors and pretty formulas of happiness (according to the iconography of the media, the ad agencies, and the beautiful images we used to enjoy), we discover the very cruel idea that the woman/wife can so easily be replaced by another woman/wife as long as she performs the same functions as her predecessor: cook the meals, take care of the kids, water the plants, kiss her husband, let herself be fucked, etc.…). So despite the pleasure of making this film, enjoying the picnics, the kids and the trees, the pleasure of showing all of this with a certain voluptuousness, I didn’t lose sight of my subject.

Le Bonheur is not a psychological portrayal of an egotistical man torn between two blondes. Rather, it’s an extremely detailed almost maniacal exposé in images and clichés of a certain kind of happiness. It focuses on gestures and the function of gestures with such insistence as to provoke the very explosion of their meaning.

It’s a film that irritated lots of women, and I understand them. Just as I understand their discussions about sexual and professional discrimination in the cinema.

But I say: I didn’t have any particular problems because I was a woman, I had no more or fewer problems than, say, Rozier, Rivette, Resnais, or Rohmer (just to name men whose names begin with R). But I refuse to get yelled at because I was an alibi assuaging the consciences of the men – even if it’s a bit true. As long as I was “little Varda”, “little Agnès”, the exception in the generation called “the New Wave”, I didn’t get in anyone’s way and I was even helped out, supported, and appreciated by my “colleagues” and companions. […]

But things have changed. They changed when a lot of women decided to make films and when I myself proposed other, more radically feminist subjects. […] I learned that I needed to develop a new language of film, not just my style. Even if I was lucky enough to be “naturally” feminist (as measured both by my refusals and by the energetic choices I made to confront every constraint), even if I was lucky enough to be recognized for my work in film before the movements of the sixties, I still belong to “the movement” in both my thinking and my work. […] I remember some of the more powerful ideas that were circulating at this time: the Americans said that a woman doesn’t begin to be a feminist until she puts her relationship with a man at risk. Both the man and the life of the couple – however exciting, funny, fantastic, and rich it may be – has to be questioned.

There can be no feminist movement without putting one’s relationship at risk.
But, finally, in 1977, in an interview with Gerald Peary, she seems to have become exasperated by this changed world that has brought her to the point of questioning her film and herself, reacting against its concealed moralism and against her own self-questioning that has put her relationship to her own work at risk, and wanting to reclaim her right to have made the film in the way she did, and with the understanding that animated it (pp. 89–90):

Varda reacts heatedly to my rather impolitic, obvious question, about her Le Bonheur (1965). “Let’s not go back to that”, she bristles. “That was more than ten years ago.” For the thousandth time, someone has asked Varda how she could make a film showing a wife drowning herself in a lake so that her husband can hang out freely with his mistress.

“Some people understood Le Bonheur”, she replies disdainfully. “Women have become upset and asked, ‘How could you replace a woman with another woman?’ That’s what life is about. A man is replaced by another man in war. A woman is replaced by another woman in life.” Another point of contention: Varda cannot tolerate puritanical responses to Le Bonheur’s conclusion, where the husband blissfully marries the mistress. “If his wife committed suicide, and he wants to feel good with another woman, he has the right! Do you think he should cry for twenty years?” […] Varda […] takes to task the wife in Le Bonheur for standing by while her husband adopts a lover. “That woman wants to be an angel. Nobody is an angel. She should have said to him, ‘Go to hell! I want to be alone with you.’”

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