Agnès Varda | Le Bonheur (Happiness) / 1965

a kind of fraud

by Douglas Messerli

 

Agnès Varda (screenwriter and director) Le Bonheur (Happiness) / 1965

 

Agnès Varda’s 1965 film, Happiness, begins in a paradisiacal landscape representing a happy couple and their two beautiful children on a country outing on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

      The husband, François (Jean-Claude Drouot), a handsome hirsute being, is asleep on his beautiful wife’s lap. The children, encased in a kind of plastic then, are also sleeping. Everything in the world seems nearly perfect, and when they awaken they together walk through the woods, ending in a lily-pond straight out of Monet. As the “hero” openly displays, his life is filled with joy, a feeling subtly reiterated by the fact that Thérèse (Claire Drout) and the two children are Drouot’s real-life family as well.

     The following day we see their work-a-day realities: François is a carpenter, working of his uncle, and Thérèse labors at home as a dressmaker. Given that she also cares for the children and cooks her husband’s meals, it does appear that Thérèse has a harder time of it, particularly since her customers demand that she create a new wedding dress in a couple of weeks. Yet it is clear that both enjoy what they’re doing, living lives that create things, as opposed to the more passive job of simply taking and sending messages as does Émilie Savignard (Marie-France Boyer)—the especially beautiful woman with whom François also falls in love.

     The new relationship happens gradually and quite simply over a couple of weeks, culminating with Émilie’s move to the same city where François and his wife live.

     François admits to Émilie that he is perfectly happy in his marriage and is not seeking anything beyond it; the new relationship, he insists, simply brings him even more happiness, a joy which he didn’t even know he was missing. Yet, he also suggests that had he met Émilie first he might have married her, and suggests that she is more adventuresome, a person closer to his own personality than is his more “sturdy” and perhaps predictable wife.

     What is quite amazing about this male-centered film is that it has been directed by a feminist, who tells this tale of male infidelity without openly condemning her “hero.” But then, we must recall that Varda’s own husband, Jacques Demy, was a gay man, apparently in love with his wife, but equally attracted to gay men from whom he eventually contracted AIDS and died early.

     François, indeed, remains a good husband and father, refusing to abandon any of his commitments to his family, with whom he continues to share lovely weekends in nature. I anything, François, in his double sexual life, seems to have even more love and joy to share with everyone, even his working friends. Émilie, moreover, seems perfectly happy with the situation of this almost magically blessed couple.

      Yet, we have the feeling, somehow, that the male, in his silence, is clearly not being fair to his wife; how, if she were also to take on another lover, might he react? And how would such a situation affect his growing, quite selfish, “happiness.”

      Thérèse, herself, perceives François’ increasingly pleasure with life, and finally seeks to understand its source. Wishing not to lie to his loving wife, François explains what has happened, trying to explain to her that it means no less love for her or the children: we love each other with ten arms each, but I have simply discovered that I have another set of arms. She seems to accept his theory as they make love, as in the first scene of the film, in an open field.

     But when he awakens this time, she is missing, and he scoops up his beloved children to go in search for her. Only a few strangers have noted her passing through the fields and ponds, but when he reaches the lovely lake of the first scene, he notices a boat taking in a body of a woman who has apparently drowned.

     We never fully discover whether or not Thérèse has actually committed suicide or accidently drowned, but we can image various other scenarios: that she has been made to feel incidental in her husband’s world, that her conventionality could not extend to his open flouting of the marriage vows, or that she has determined to sacrifice her life for her husband’s further “happiness.” In any event, a bit like Hamlet’s Ophelia, she recognizes that in his own focus on his fulfillment of life of his own needs, she has grown less important and, perhaps, almost meaningless.

     To give her credit, Varda never hints at any one answer to her heroine’s actions. In fact, after a period of mourning, Émilie, apparently loving the children as much as did their mother, takes over Thérèse’s role, as the new “family” returns once more to the rural paradise with which the film began.

     Only now, we feel that the beautiful world which the film is portraying is a kind of fraud. The happiness of this film is a male-centric vision of how things should happen instead of having anything to do with the reality of the work. The fact that Varda has create it, in fact, almost mocks those hundreds of male idylls such as Jules and Jim and other Truffaut films, wherein males are generally awarded a greater “happiness” than their female lovers. Ultimately there is something almost fatuous about François new-found “bonheur” at the end of the film.

     Several years after writing the above, I came upon a quite brilliant short essay from a commentator using the moniker “montypython22” (how I wish such intelligent writers would be more open about their contributions) writing on a Reddit site TrueFilm in which he quite perceptively reminds us that “Le bonheur” in French is male, not female, and that nearly everything that defines the state of happiness, accordingly, is tinted with the masculine gender.

 

“Le bonheur. Not la bonheur. Even when we’re talking about a woman’s happiness, in French, the ‘le’ article insinuates a masculine happiness...

      The reason I bring this up? Well, we’ll have to consider our auteur for this thread—Agnes Varda—and her penchant for wordplay. Anyone who dives into the work of Agnes Varda will find her work is replete with constant puns, repartee, quirky quips, and meditations on language. She is a person who is not only interested with the grammar packed into a painting, a still photograph, a moving picture—she is also interested in how spoken words relate to what is being spoken. Certainly, somebody as delightfully verbose and in-tune with the intricacies of language as Varda would have picked up on the fact that happiness, in the French language, is defined by a masculine article. Though it seems like a minor note, it is a crucial one. Le Bonheur, a film with one of the most intensely subjectivized male perspectives in cinema history, comes from a director whose primary concern has been the female perspective. Why, then, does Varda feel the need to not only a.) tell the story of a marriage through the perspective of the overly idiotic male, but also b.) refuse to condemn ANY of his actions throughout the course of her film?”

 

    Recounting the story I have described above, he (or possibly she) concludes that:

 

    “Le Bonheur remains one of Agnes Varda’s most daringly constructed feature films. Its subversive message railing against chauvinistic perceptions of marriage, happiness is cloaked under a palate of beautiful chromatic colors and the lilts of Mozart’s spring-themed pieces. To paraphrase Varda, what interests her are “the clichés of happiness, the set images that society and art have dictated to indicate the state of happiness.” According to Varda, the aim of Le bonheur is to “seriously question these clichés” and to twist them on their heads in disturbing ways. Not only is the film a visual feast—in many ways, it can serve as a companion piece to husband Jacques Demy’s equally bombastic tale of tragedy and loss The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)—it is also, narratively, quite original. Not once does Varda allow her female characters’ voices to be heard; instead, we gather the information of this too-perfect world from the husband, François. By giving us only François’s perspective, Varda enables the viewer to consider the question of happiness from a biased source and, through subtle cues, asks us to dislike—even hate—his saccharine disposition.

….What do we make of the film’s ending, where François successfully assimilates the once-liberated Émilie into his cookie-cutter vision of conjugal happiness? Is this to suggest, like in Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, that all happiness is only fleeting and ephemeral? Or does it suggest that all marriages are doomed to the sickening banalities of François’s marriages?”

 

     Given the reality of Varda’s own marriage, I suggest we must take account of Demy’s own notions of possible “happiness” regarding the many gay relationships her own husband explored over the years during his marriage. I am not arguing, at all, that Varda’s film is in any way a direct commentary about her own marriage. We can never fully know how these two individuals chose to negotiate their personal lives together despite their sexual differences, or can we ever truly comprehend what Varda’s reactions were to her husband’s outside sexual liaisons. Despite Demy’s own success, Varda went on to create a body of work that in many ways matches and may even have surpassed her husband’s own filmmaking history. Sometimes relationships have that affect of challenging a forceful other to create in meaningfully important other directions as Varda did.

     Varda’s film narrowly embraces only the heterosexual world, but we cannot simply ignore the other realities behind this brilliant understated work, that employs gentle irony to make its point.

We must remind ourselves also that Demy’s own, quite “gay” work, was totally about the heterosexual world. These are coded worlds that don’t even offer clues for the unknowing general audience.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2016; June 23, 2026

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2016) and My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).