When Le Bonheur premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 1965 it was met with both admiration and unease. The film, directed by Agnès Varda, is an exquisitely beautiful yet deeply unsettling exploration of happiness, love and betrayal. With its pastel palette, idyllic countryside settings and languorous pacing, it appears at first glance to be a celebration of domestic bliss. Yet beneath the surface Varda offers a devastating critique of the fragility, and perhaps even the artifice, of bourgeois life.
Varda had already established her reputation with La Pointe Courte (1955) and Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962). Both films revealed her ability to fuse documentary realism with poetic symbolism. In Le Bonheur she took a bold turn. Here she set aside the existential anxieties that characterised much of the New Wave in favour of something more deceptively serene. The result is a film that is, visually, one of her most radiant works but morally, one of her most unsettling.
The plot centres on François (Jean-Claude Drouot), a young carpenter who seems to embody the ideal of contentment. He adores his wife Thérèse (Claire Drouot, the real-life wife of Jean-Claude) and their two small children. Their life together is depicted as idyllic. Picnics in sun-dappled meadows, tender embraces beneath blossoming trees and evenings filled with laughter. Yet when François begins an affair with Émilie (Marie-France Boyer), a postal worker, he insists that his love for Thérèse remains undiminished. His logic is chillingly simple: there is more happiness because there are more people to share it.
The audacity of this reasoning is at the heart of Varda’s film. François’s actions are never framed as malicious. Instead they are presented with a certain inevitability, almost as if Varda is daring us to question whether happiness can ever be truly sustained. When tragedy strikes, it is portrayed with an eerie detachment, the narrative gliding forward as if little has changed. The pastoral idyll remains intact but the viewer is left grappling with the implications of such seamless substitution.
Visually, Le Bonheur is a triumph of colour and composition. Varda worked closely with cinematographer Jean Rabier, a frequent collaborator with Claude Chabrol, to create an almost painterly aesthetic. Each frame is saturated with the hues of Impressionist landscapes: sunflowers, blue skies and verdant fields. Yet as with the art of Renoir or Manet, beneath the beauty lies unease. The colours do not simply illustrate happiness, they also mask discontent, suggesting that the surface brightness of life often conceals darker truths.
Equally significant is Varda’s use of music. Mozart’s string quartets weave throughout the film, their lilting harmonies reinforcing the aura of serenity. But much like François’s reasoning, the music lulls us into a false sense of comfort. It underscores the dissonance between the apparent tranquillity of the world on screen and the moral unease we feel as spectators.
At the time of its release, Le Bonheur provoked heated debate. Some critics praised its beauty and daring while others accused Varda of endorsing François’s actions. Varda herself resisted definitive interpretations. Insisting that the film was not a condemnation, nor an endorsement. but a provocation, a mirror held up to society’s ideals of family, fidelity and happiness. She described it as a beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside.
Today, the film retains its power to unsettle. In the wake of second-wave feminism, François’s blithe acceptance of his own desires appears even more troubling. While Thérèse’s fate invites uncomfortable questions about women’s place within the domestic space of 1960s France. Yet Varda’s refusal to moralise ensures that the film transcends its era. It remains a haunting meditation on the nature of happiness itself, its elusiveness, its selfishness and its fragility.
With Le Bonheur, Varda crafted one of her most paradoxical works. A film of exquisite beauty that leaves a bitter aftertaste. It is as radiant as a summer afternoon and as disturbing as the realisation that happiness, when rooted in inequality, can be nothing more than a fragile illusion.
www.ellencheshire.com
if needed… Ellen Cheshire has an MA in Gothic: Culture, Subculture, Counterculture and a BA (Hons) in Humanities: Film and English. With over 30 years of film writing experience, Ellen has published widely in journals, books, magazines and British Film Institute publications. She has written books on Jane Campion and Ang Lee for Supernova’s In the Scene series, Bio-Pics: A Life in Pictures for Columbia University Press and contributed to UK Counterculture: A Celebration and Silent: Women Pioneers of Cinema, and worked on archive projects for Taschen and educational texts for Hodder Education. Alongside writing, Ellen teaches film and has a background in arts and media management.
