The Old Guard of the New Wave
Pioneering in so many areas, the French New Wave was nonetheless a boys' club, drawn from the swaggering young savants who wrote for the influential French film magazine Cahiers du cinema. But all-stars Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard trod in the footsteps of a photographer whose own innovative debut — in 1954 — came after supposedly seeing only a handful of movies.
That film is the big rediscovery of a new DVD boxed set from Criterion devoted to the French auteur Agnès Varda. Five years before the rags-to-riches Cannes triumph of Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" in 1959, Ms. Varda, then 25, went to a fishing village on the Mediterranean Sea and shot "La Pointe Courte," an astonishing work that flaunted the New Wave one-two of maverick reinvention and budget-rate independence.
Ms. Varda, who is nearing 80 and has run her own production company, Ciné-Tamaris, for much of that time, is a well-established figure of French cinema, but "La Pointe Courte" has stubbornly remained an archival rarity. Here, Criterion packages it with another underseen Varda film, the hypnotic, tainted pastoral "Le Bonheur" (1964), whose bold and bright '60s palette has suffered on washed-out VHS editions. Also included are remastered editions of two previous releases: the indispensable Paris chronicle of a stricken singer, "Cleo From 5 to 7" (1961), and the rugged postmortem of a female drifter, "Vagabond" (1985).
In "Cleo From 5 to 7," the blend of youthful pleasures and melancholy slides easily into the traditional New Wave canon; but "La Pointe Courte" is a more starkly conceived work. Inspired by the alternating stand-alone storylines of Faulkner's "Wild Palms," Ms. Varda separately traced a couple's wistful attempt to reconnect in the town where the man grew up, and the celebrations, squabbles, and daily lives of the fishing families around them. Sequence to sequence, the seaside rhythms and salty dialogue of the neorealist setting toggle with the lovers' pas de deux of reflections, recriminations, and formal arabesques.
Anchoring this curious blend of arty and artless is the mistral-blown natural beauty of the sleepy coastal hamlet. Ms. Varda's photographer's instinct makes a crisp portfolio out of the couple's soul-searching tour — weatherbeaten fishermen, breezy squat dwellings, a slithering eel and slapping fish, entitled cats and grubby children. Though the wearying soberness of stage actors Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort was intentional, the villagers are a needed relief as they go about the grittier business of outfoxing fishery inspectors and sussing out suitable marital matches. (Of the couple, one says: "They talk too much to be happy.")
If not as instantly digestible as its descendants, "La Pointe Courte" makes for one of those missing-link moments (which are admittedly not as rare in the percolating '50s as sometimes claimed). Ms. Varda's cooperative-run production cost a fraction of most New Wave films, even as it presaged their documentary settings and intertextual awareness. But instead of the elegant cool of Paris to come from Mr. Godard and friends, we watch this village's boat-jousting festival, or its sun-bleached alleys, from swaying pan shots, all experienced up-front and vividly, thanks to Ms. Varda's level sound mix.
Too early for the New Wave's storming of the film-factory gates, "La Pointe Courte" suffered the ludicrous fate of being classified an "amateur" production, and was thus ineligible for distribution. But "Cleo From 5 to 7," which in any other batch of Ms. Varda's films would probably be the centerpiece, cruised proudly into the 1962 Cannes Film Festival amid a flurry of publicity for its well-chosen lead, the pop star Corinne Marchand. In between, Ms. Varda made short films, two of which Criterion includes in a nod to her ever-growing catalog of mini-essays. "L'Opéra Mouffe" (1958), filmed during the director's first pregnancy, is a commonplace book of streetside reflections and avant-garde sketches that Ms. Varda has called a "neighborhood film"; "Du côté de la côte" (1958) turns a wry, colorful eye toward a very different stretch of coast, the Côte d'Azur.
Which brings us to 1965's "Le Bonheur," and what a strange place it is. The colors pop and the dimples twinkle in this portrait of a perfect, loving family — almost perfect. The film is a pastoral in its ideals and its Edenic country settings, righting itself after a slight but significant hiccup that is best left unspoiled. An affair, conducted by the carpenter husband (Jean-Claude Drouot) during supposed work errands, is what seems set to crack the happy picture, or at least to ruffle the calm. The dizzy moment when the husband decides to go for it is marked by a tiny, thrilling fugue of cuts and shifts. Ms. Varda's freshly unnerving drama, played by Mr. Drouot and his real-life wife and children, is far more intriguing and malleable than the art-house's ensuing decades of rote dissections of marital order. It's a puzzle movie that makes for lively, vexed debate, and its reserved judgment is all the more interesting alongside the point-of-view experiments of "Cleo" and the multiple perspectives of "Vagabond."
Despite the fate of "La Pointe Courte" till now, there is no reason to sound an elegy for Ms. Varda. She's reveling in her documentary tendencies, her efforts collected most recently into "Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc...," the 2005 omnibus of pensées and photographic musings shown at Film Forum. (Perhaps Criterion will consider gathering a documentary sidebar set as it did for Louis Malle.) And Ms. Varda, who is wonderfully ubiquitous in the Criterion extras, which draw heavily on her own meta-movies, is way past false modesty. Evaluating her debut as if it were someone else's, she evenly hails her own entry among film history's various moments of "rebirth." Considering that she showed French filmmakers what could be done with an auteur's ambitious conception right out of the gate (and for how much money), that's one boast I won't quibble over.
