Le Bonheur (1965)

“Happiness works by addition.”

Director: Agnès Varda

I'll get to some spoilers eventually, my friend.

Mozart, sunflowers, a matching quartet of mother, father, daughter and son. The vibrant colors of costume and setting in a synthesis almost too dulcet to the eye. Possessing the sort of clean, blithe attitude you'd find on expensive stationary or Toile fabric, the film opens in scenes of pastoral picnics and quiet small-city days, following the family life of a young carpenter named François. With honest labor and an overall honest life (watch out, François), he is blessed with a simple, continuous happiness, marked by close family, adorable and obedient children, and all the domestic pleasures a man could be given from his very beautiful wife.


With luck expanding exponentially, François soon meets another woman of equal beauty and begins an affair with her with a boyish exuberance that finds love, joy, and perfect satisfaction in the relationship almost immediately. What's more, this woman, Émilie, is alright with his wife and children and his relationship with his wife only gets better. Here's where the spoonful of sugar gets hard to swallow though. Honest and drunk with happiness, François reveals the affair to his wife, using a silly metaphor about adding another blossoming apple tree to the orchard in order to explain his thought that “Happiness works by addition.” She seems to accept her husband's infidelity calmly and with an open-mind, until a scene later when the floral print of her sun dress is soaked and mingling with the grass where her drowned body was pulled from the nearby lake. Autumn approaches and François grieves, but soon returns to Émilie who is quickly accepted as wife and mother in matching sweaters, carrying flowers and walking in the afternoon sun with her family.

The film is all-around beautiful and sweet to the eyes from the opening shot of approaching family to the mirrored end as they depart. With organized shots and color fades, its not only nice to watch but easy to watch. I know it's a bit obvious, but I kept thinking Wes Anderson in all the strange quick establishing shots, bright colors, and symmetry that Varda chose to use.

Le Bonheur is a tryst into the meaning of happiness, honesty, family, and love. It focuses on the fragility of happiness, how it might be as fleeting as the summer months--rich and slow when they are there, but sour and cold in their departure. François and his wife live happy, nice lives but everything seems very routine and dry, almost too lovely to stand. Summer needs to end. Even still though, the autumn is still beautiful, just in a different way, and summer is faithful in its return.

grin and bear it, welcome to happiness:


It was great, but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. Perhaps I consider myself a little too cynical to be head-over-heels charmed by the color and beauty and love-making of French stunners in the 1960s. Psh. No. It was great, it was beautiful