A Philandering Tale

Le Bonheur translates the French word for happiness into an exquisite fable of infidelity, set to music by Mozart, delicately filmed in the impressionist manner of Renoir, and committed to an utterly cynical contemporary view of the gap between male and female sensibility. Writer-Director Agnes Varda (Cleo From 5 to 7) suffuses the screen with a rueful, youthful, radiant mood, creates a world of innocence and beauty that looks like an invitation for romping barefoot through fields of wildflowers newly abloom. Only later does she reveal that every blossom holds a thorn.

Varda's hero is a handsome young carpenter named Franc,ois, an easygoing embodiment of the masculine principle, feelingly played by Actor Jean-Claude Drouot, whose real-life wife Claire and their two children portray his family on film. Franc,ois defines happiness as "submitting to the order of nature," and his life unfolds as a midsummer day's dream of simple pleasures: work, lovemaking, raising the children, traipsing off to the woods for a family picnic. These sequences have the honey warmth and texture of old snapshots or souvenirs collected on a holiday.

Never meaning to spoil his idyl, Franc,ois expands it when he meets and swiftly succumbs to a vivacious blonde postal clerk (Marie-France Boyer). The girl becomes his mistress, and he is happier than ever. One day, at yet another family picnic, his wife asks why. Franc,ois forthrightly explains: "You, me, the kids, we're like an apple orchard inside a fence. Then I see another apple outside--." Though she is not at all sure that she likes those apples, the wife lets Franc,ois make love to her once more while the children sleep. A little while afterward, she slips away and drowns herself. At the film's end, Francois, now married to his mistress, goes blissfully strolling through the forest with his new wife and his children.

Director Varda exempts exempts Franc,ois both from praise and condemnation. She merely accepts his behavior as an inexorable fact of life, and dramatizes it bewitchingly in unforced New Cinema style, using abrupt cuts and soft focus to suggest the spontaneous electricity generated by lovers, repeating one action several times to underscore the emotional impact of a scene. The film's conceptual flaw is in the character of the carpenter, a prefabrication rather obviously nailed onto a thesis. Socially and psychologically in limbo, freely indulging his impulses, Franc,ois may be intended as a natural Everyman but can also seem a bit of a nit, a boy rover in a working-class wonderland. Tested against cold reality, his story rings false; yet Varda gives it the aura of just-discovered truth, of a vision entirely personal and poetic.

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