La Pointe Courte precludes the fun offered by the leisurely jaunts of the Cahiers du Cinema French New Wave group (Francois Truffaut, sometimes Godard, et al) and imposes the same intellectual calisthenics of Agnès Varda’s fellow Left Bank group (Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, et al). Her second film, Cleo from 5 to 7, has more in common with the former camp, but her first effort belongs entirely to the latter. I’ve been anticipating this film ever since Bruce Kawin, a film history professor at CU Boulder, pointed out it is the true first film of the New Wave. Hmmm… even before The 400 Blows? Or even Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows? Kawin and other scholars may be right about Varda’s place in history, but La Pointe Courte is nowhere near as coherent or engaging as other early New Wave(esque) films. To be honest, I had no idea what Varda was going for after finishing the film and was left wanting an explanation. An explanation, thankfully, the Criterion DVD supplements are always willing to provide.

I discovered Varda’s intention was to mimic the narrative structure of William Faulkner’s long overlooked novel Wild Palms. The novel has two totally unrelated stories told side by side; one is a love story taking place in 1938 and the other is about the ordeal of a prisoner in 1927. The only physical link between the two stories is a prison in Mississippi. La Pointe Courte, a small Mediterranean village on the coast of France, is the physical setting of the two unrelated stories being told in Varda’s film; one is a love story and the other is about the sociopolitical ordeal of the village’s fishermen.

Regardless of the film’s appealing inspiration, I quickly lost interest in the love story portion; the couple’s pseudo-intellectual voiceover musings on the nature of their affection and relationship comes across as pompous and irrelevant. Their boring story never sits well with vignettes of a destitute village and its crumbling economy, threatened by the disintegration of its sole export. Perhaps it’s not supposed to, like Faulkner’s novel. After all, Varda does not attempt to link her stories through aesthetic or narrative devices, literally cutting from one to the other in a completely arbitrary way. The result is frustrating and dull. What might have worked in the realm of literature does not necessarily translate well to the realm of cinema. Sure, I can see why this technique was impressive in 1956 and why La Pointe Courte is considered the precursor to the French New Wave; it is fresh and entirely different on a purely aesthetic level. Yet despite the boldness of its narrative structure and moments of remarkable journalistic cinematography akin to neorealism, it lacks any real emotion.

This review originally appeared in DenverProjectionBooth.blogspot.com in August 2008.