Word: varda
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...BONHEUR. A happy French philanderer tacks blissfully between his wife and mistress in Director Agnès Varda's exquisite essay on young love, spelled out with considerable cynicism...
...Bonheur translates the French word for happiness into an exquisite fable of infidelity, set to music by Mozart, delicately filmed in the impressionist manner of Renoir, and committed to an utterly cynical contemporary view of the gap between male and female sensibility. Writer-Director Agnès Varda (Cleo From 5 to 7) suffuses the screen with a rueful, youthful, radiant mood, creates a world of innocence and beauty that looks like an invitation for romping barefoot through fields of wildflowers newly abloom. Only later does she reveal that every blossom holds a thorn...
...Varda's hero is a handsome young carpenter named François, an easygoing embodiment of the masculine principle, feelingly played by Actor Jean-Claude Drouot, whose real-life wife Claire and their two children portray his family on film. François defines happiness as "submitting to the order of nature," and his life unfolds as a midsummer day's dream of simple pleasures: work, lovemaking, raising the children, traipsing off to the woods for a family picnic. These sequences have the honey warmth and texture of old snapshots or souvenirs collected on a holiday...
...Director Varda exempts exempts François both from praise and condemnation. She merely accepts his behavior as an inexorable fact of life, and dramatizes it bewitchingly in unforced New Cinema style, using abrupt cuts and soft focus to suggest the spontaneous electricity generated by lovers, repeating one action several times to underscore the emotional impact of a scene. The film's conceptual flaw is in the character of the carpenter, a prefabrication rather obviously nailed onto a thesis. Socially and psychologically in limbo, freely indulging his impulses, François may be intended as a natural Everyman...
...show more than this. It intends to show a crise de I'ãme, "a profound transformation of the being." It doesn't. For one thing, Actress Marchand's face is no more capable of transformation than a kewpie doll's. For another, Director Varda suddenly twists the heroine's harm into a happy ending which sentimentally suggests that every shroud has a silver lining...