Le bonheur
A Complicated Passion: Two Films by Agnès Varda
September 17, 2024
This barbed masterpiece—about a carpenter testing the limits of the domestic bliss he knows with his picture-perfect wife and children, a complement to the crescendoing feminist movement in the mid-’60s—exemplifies Varda at her boldest.
Post-screening discussion with A Complicated Passion author Carrie Rickey and critic Molly Haskell, followed by a book signing. Get double feature tickets with Les créatures and save!
The sun-drenched idyll of Le bonheur, Varda’s third feature, flowers into a chillier tale of infidelity. A carpenter named François (Jean-Claude Drouot) lives in Edenic bliss with his picture-perfect wife and children (Drouot’s real-life family), but when he strikes up an acquaintance with a charming postal clerk (Marie-France Boyer), he begins to test the limits of his domestic stability. As he does, Le bonheur’s impressionist tableaux, lusciously photographed by Claude Beausoleil and Jean Rabier, takes on razor-sharp edges, all while a chasm widens between François’s self-involvement and its casualties. This barbed masterpiece—a complement to the crescendoing feminist movement in the mid-’60s—exemplifies Varda at her boldest.
Born in Los Angeles, Carrie Rickey is an award-winning film critic, art critic, and film historian. She was the film critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty-five years and has also written for Artforum, Art in America, Film Comment, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Politico. She has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philadelphia.
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