“Feminist movies” is obviously a loaded phrase in the film world. Even if we forget about men who treat film like a contest that women are by virtue of their gender not allowed to participate in, most people, even those who wear their cinephile badges on their chests, seem to think that Zero Dark Thirty and Wonder Woman are the prime examples of feminist cinema (because anything a woman makes is automatically feminist, right guys?). So even though Agnes Varda still isn’t as big of a name as she should be, I’m glad Le Bonheur’s inclusion into the Criterion Collection gives some of these so-called cinephiles a reason to watch one of the most blistering critiques of masculinity I’ve ever seen.
Beautiful candy-colored interiors, Mozart, intentionally exaggerated performances, and vacuous dialogue comprise Le Bonheur’s false image of an idyllic paradise packed to the brim with traditional gender roles. She is a dressmaker and housewife who lives in a washed-out women’s magazine of a house, He a carpenter who drinks at work with his Bardot-worshipping coworkers. Varda’s way of amplifying the cheery tone of the film instead of probing her character’s actions means that we can only take Francois’ idiotic justification for his cheating that “happiness works by addition” at face value, and the cloying over-saturated images and music seem to be nodding playfully at his logic as the film careens into destruction. At the end, the colors dull, the music stops, the camera stutters to tear apart the film’s facade of self-serving joy, and the happiness is over. When the film’s visual style came back in full-force, happiness was the last thing on my mind - only horror and disbelief.
I believe this film serves two purposes: in general it is a critique of hedonism and the consequences of searching for happiness at all costs, and the exaggerated tone of the film wraps around an attack on destructive male entitlement through the oversimplified and detached actions of Francois. This “family man” initially uses postal worker Emilie because he’s fascinated with her free-spirited nature (to say the least of his revelry in the secret passion and transgression from married life their affair represents), but ironically, when his source of stability is gone, he seeks to mold his mistress into utter submission. Scenes at Francois’ work show that this is a pervasive, socially-conditioned issue. Cheating is normalized to these men because women are just receptacles to assign labels to - housewife, mother, sexpot, mistress.
While Le Bonheur is ultimately a chilling film, Varda’s trademark humanism and respect for her characters somehow keeps it from feeling like a mean-spirited downer. The sly societal critiques that hover around the edges of the frame play into the film’s refusal to cast any ultimate judgment on its inhabitants - just as Francois is a product of his environment, so are the women clinging to modern definitions of how a wife should act, sometimes until the very end.