Le Bonheur

Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival 1965 and the Louis Delluc Prize the same year. The film consolidated Varda, after her earlier Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), as one of the most distinctive directors of the broader French New Wave; her work would extend across more than five decades through Vagabond (1985), The Gleaners and I (2000), and the late-career documentary work that culminated in Faces Places (2017).

A young French carpenter named François (Jean-Claude Drouot, in his lead role with his real-life wife Claire Drouot playing his on-screen wife and their actual children Olivier and Sandrine playing their on-screen children) loves his wife Thérèse and their two young children. He decides — without any apparent moral hesitation that the film treats as a problem — that he can also love a young postal clerk named Émilie (Marie-France Boyer) in the next town with no diminishment of his existing happiness. The film follows the resulting domestic arrangement across one summer.

The film operates in a sustained register of brightly-coloured fairy-tale realism that has been continuously debated since release. Varda's commitment to making the film's surface beauty work against its actual moral subject — and her refusal to either condemn or endorse François's position — produced one of the most-discussed pieces of 1960s feminist-philosophical cinema. Jean Rabier's photography of summer-saturated French rural-village exteriors is among the most distinctive of the New Wave era.