Art Appreciation and Philosophy

Agnès Varda’s most sumptuous and stylized film was also one of her most controversial. Le Bonheur concerns a blissfully happy family man (Jean-Claude Drouot), a loving husband and father to his wife and children, who decides to increase his happiness by taking a mistress. Sure, why not? The film’s sunny, seemingly idyllic world is filled with the spirited strains of Mozart and has a beautiful colour palette evoking the French Impressionists. Audiences were flummoxed, however, by the seeming contradictions and amorality of the film. Was Varda critiquing the selfish pursuit of happiness in a modern, self-centered world? The limitations of fidelity and family life? Offering an ironic female perspective on male fantasy and male filmmaking? Le Bonheur​’s daring aesthetics and ambiguities still register as audacious and unsettling.

"It's like nothing else: a horror movie wrapped up in sunflowers, an excoriating feminist diatribe strummed to the tune of a love ballad." (The Cinematheque)

“I imagined a summer peach with its perfect colors — and inside there is a worm.” (Agnès Varda)

"In its interrogation of the characters' ostensible happiness, Le Bonheur records ironies and exposes cliché. But it leaves moral accounting to the audience." (A.V. Club)

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