Odi
I’ll watch it next week and let you know.
Personally I thought the film was pretty swell albeit a little too on the nose and thus predictable in some ways for me. I take it you didn’t much care for it’s rather dark take on romance?
Edit: Nope, that wasn’t the thread I wanted so I deleted it. That did have a wee tiny bit talk about the movie, but there was some other thread somewhere that had more. It’s probably in some not clearly defined thread though so I doubt I’ll be able to find it easily. Nonetheless, there should be some more opinions on the film since it was in the “world cup” film event we had here.
I’ll check it out — thanks, Greg! Well it’s not that, it’s just that it was like there was a murder in the middle of the film that basically got glossed over, or a huge wound or something that should have caused a huge wound that just seemed to heal up quickly and everything was back to normal. I didn’t know what to make of that. It wasn’t really explored psychologically at all. Very puzzling.
Well, looks like I’ll have to see it now, won’t I?
I hope so… To me it’s like a film that is totally flat, rips open and has 3 dimensions suddenly, and then becomes flat again. There’s a lot to discuss about what it’s message was, and how Varda went about communicating it, I think…
loved this movie.
It’s on my list
@Caligula – what did you like about it? Do elaborate, please. :)
This may be tacky but I’m just going to paste what I wrote on the film page ^ _ ^
A beautiful film but it bothers me that the women in the film are ultimately interchangeable. Perhaps that is the point of the film though – in a traditional conception of marriage the role of the wife if split into her various functions (cook, nanny, lover, maid) and ANY woman can perform those functions and is defined merely by how well she accomplishes them instead of who she is.
I don’t know, I think the point of the film is about “happiness” as the title states — questioning whether, while it is not abnormal for someone to be able to love more than one person deeply, some people are like that, in reality it can be very toxic, even in this case deadly, for a couple, for a person who does not have that kind of disposition.
The women in this film are very passive. The pretty postal worker lover (who looks very similar to the wife) plays along with the main character’s “setup,” the wife externally submits to his desire to have more than one kind of “apple tree” in his life, but then it basically kills her very soon after he asks her to accept this fact about him. There’s a consequence for the main character’s action of telling the brutal truth (brutal to his wife, who is not like him), but even though it is tragic, it seems he knee jerks right back to the kind of life he had before, or stated made him happy before the lover entered his life. In this sense yes, his lover then substitutes as his wife. One wonders where this story will go from there… because he states that his lover is more like him than his wife. I wonder about that, and a whole bunch of other things. This film brings up a lot of questions for me, as I mentioned above.
Well the “happiness” in the title is kind of a tongue-in-cheek reference it seems. That’s in line with her general critique of a patriarchal model of family life revolving around the male’s happiness which can be achieved by any woman at all or women capable performing of various behind-the-scenes and taken-for-granted functions.
Varda acheives this brilliantly through the faire le menage montage which she shows twice. The first time we see the first wife’s hands ONLY performing the banal tasks of maintaining a household. Then the scene occurs again after the wife’s suicide only showing the lover’s hands doing the exact same tasks maybe to the same music as she ingratiates herself into the mother/wife role of the family. I believe she omits showing the women’s faces in this and a few other scenes to illustrate that it doesn’t matter who is doing these things in the sense of the woman not being appreciated from a holistic sense as a human being with hopes and desires by the husband.Varda resists the temptation to be didactic by making the husband a perfectly likeable and gentle man instead of a rabid narcissist or violent misogynist. It shows how these expectations are in the thread and weave of bourgeois family structure.
So do you see this story as a feminist critique of the role of women, or how women are perceived by men, or the perfect fantasy of a man (derailed for a minute by the suicide of his first partner)?
all three! The first may either be the director’s intent or my interpretation of the film which is tricky because it is quite subtle.
The use of music and color certainly point to the fantasy elements of it, however I hesitate to use the word “perceived” in your second formulation because I felt that the husband viewed himself as a passive observer in all of his relationships.
He doesn’t seem to take much ownership of how he came into the adulterous situation – he characterizes it as something that just happened and luckily he was open to it and had enough love for both of them. He isn’t overly concerned with what the women do in their own time as long as it doesn’t take away from their time together and ability to experience his “happiness” with them or as long as it doesn’t affect the circumstances necessary for him to move freely back and forth between the two women and their respective spaces. I think “perceiving” may imply an active role on his part whereas “taking it for granted” suggests an unthinking expectation. Although, that’s just my thinking.
I see what you mean and this is something I had in the back of my mind but wasn’t sure whether it was relevant as a guess regarding what the film was really about. That’s what I was talking about when I said that a serious thing happened in the middle of this film that was just glossed over. It’s kind of psychotic. That’s why I’m also wondering whether Varda was kind of making fun of what she was suggesting as you mention above. Did she take this sort of thinking to its logical end — i.e. it questions the notion of “happiness” in that there is no such thing? I mean, it’s all fake? The colors in the film while beautiful, were also kind of nauseatingly beautiful to me. It was like Oz.
That’s what I was talking about when I said that a serious thing happened in the middle of this film that was just glossed over. It’s kind of psychotic.
Exactly. Everyone was sad about it for like a minute before going on about their business (at least in film time). It was jarring transition to watch. I definitely think she’s satirizing the possibility of “happiness” in such an arrangement.
At least, happiness for the women in question, no matter how “modern” their outlook. Do you know of any other films that tackle this issue?
Hmm, let me think on that one for a bit. I’m sure I can come up with a few :)
A hit when it was released both in France and the U.S. , this is one of Varda’s strangest films. She imagines a world without jealousey.
Our hero loves his wife and kids dearly. Then he meets another woman and begins an affair with her. He doesn’t turn on or neglect the wife at all. He tells her all about it. And she’s pleased at first. Then she decides that she’s in the way of his true happiness
so she drowns herself.
Our hero then rounds up the kids and and marries woamn number two. Th last shot is of the new family walkig off togehter, quite happily into a lovely forest glade
All of this is done, mind you, to the strains of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Gorgeous and subtly creepy.
Yeah, I’m still creeped out about it! I read that she described this film as a summer fruit with a worm in it. Pretty much…!
Excellent discussion of a film it’s been almost a year and a half since I saw it. I’ll have to watch a few parts first before I contribute to this conversation. Frederic Fonteyne’s Gille’s Wife’s first half seems to have an omnipotent similarity to Le Bonheur’s magical reality.
A perfect depiction of an utterly bankrupt male fantasy.
I was thinking “male fantasy” too, until the suicide. Then I didn’t understand what was going on.
What suicide? She accidentally fell in. Guilt-free tragedy!
Yes, there’s that to debate too! It’s not clear. But either way, things seem to settle back into place awfully quickly after her death, don’t you think? Or so, as Machiko said above, quickly in movie time.
I have a different interpretation of her drowning herself – although it may have been an accident too, it’s not at all clear. Instead of her killing herself because she’s “in the way of his true happiness” I felt like it was the only choice that gave her both agency and rest. She’s left with two shitty options: share the man she loves or leave him and continue to toil as caregiver and maid alone forgoing the pleasures of romantic love. It doesn’t seem like joint custody was an option since in the film the husband is shown as willing to allow his brother and sister-in-law to raise his kids in absence of a wife/mother figure – I think this was pretty standard of male widowers and divorcees in at least North America and Western Europe at the time (it’s even a part of Revolutionary Road).
Instead of resignation she chooses action – to take herself out of the equation. It’s the only assertive thing her character does in the film.
The only reason I favor this particular strain of feminist interpretation over others is because of the themes of Varda’s other work. There are certainly many other ways to understand this film.
But it IS mysterious, the whole thing about her death. How/why she died. The only clue we’re given is one of the people at the park say that they saw her walking by with flowers in her hand. Immediately, I don’t know why, but I thought of this painting of Ophelia:
http://www.toffsworld.com/art_artists_painters/pre-raphaelites_art_movement.htm
There was something mad about leaving your children and husband and wandering off with flowers. It also echoes the beginning scenes when she is carrying a bouquet as a memorandum of their trip to her aunt’s house. Whether or not she fell or jumped, there was something wrong with her that ended in her dying.
ooooh nice Ophelia association! You probably have something there.
Thanks — I remember weird things… :)
The all-important final line of Max Ophuls’ LE PLAISIR – “Happiness isn’t always fun!”
Fassbinder was a great admirer of LE BONHEUR.
odilonvert
If there’s already been a good in-depth discussion of this film, please let me know where I can find it. If not, what do you all think of this Varda film? I thought it was beautiful visually, but the story line… grotesque. Apparently it caused a bit of a stir in its day.