Le Bonheur

Le Bonheur (Happiness) is a 1965 French drama directed and written by Agnès Varda, her third feature, about a happily married carpenter who takes a mistress and treats the affair as an addition to, not a threat to, his family life. The film stars Jean-Claude Drouot, his real-life wife Claire Drouot, and Marie-France Boyer, and it won the Prix Louis-Delluc and the Silver Bear at the 1965 Berlin International Film Festival.^{1 • 2}

Style and visual design

The film's visual design was inspired by the light-splashed colors of the Impressionist painters, beginning with a closeup of a sunflower. Varda included a scene in which Jean Renoir's Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1959) plays on a television, and she noted that Impressionist paintings "emanate such melancholy, though they depict scenes of everyday happiness." Her own summary of the film's method became its most quoted description: "I imagined a summer peach with its perfect colors, and inside, there is a worm."¹

The Cinémathèque française describes the result as an ambivalent fable about the couple: warm colors and a daily life filmed like an eternal Sunday in the country, leaving a chilling impression. The critic notes Renoir-like touches and Matisse-like flat color areas, and observes that Varda films adultery without ever questioning or judging it, presenting the liaison as a source of additional joy for a hero convinced he is hurting no one.⁵

Production and casting

Varda cast Jean-Claude Drouot, then the star of the television series Thierry La Fronde, as François, with his wife Claire as Thérèse and their own children as the screen couple's children. Drouot, married to Claire since 1960, said at the time of the film's 2006 restoration that "I believe the film actually helped us as a couple, as a family. One makes the choice of denying oneself."¹ The film was produced by Mag Bodard, with production by Parc Films in 1964, and was released in France on 10 February 1965.^{3 • 7 • 2}

Reception and controversy

The film's release, in Varda's words, ignited a firestorm of controversy and brought her international acclaim and notoriety. Many critics of the time found it disturbing at best and amoral at worst, and Varda steadfastly refused to explain it, leaving interpretation to viewers.¹ Despite the awards, the Cinémathèque française records that many viewers at the time did not grasp the film's transgressive character, even with the under-18 ban and the Church's blame; the substitution of wife by mistress creates a malaise, the impression of a "beautiful wormy fruit."⁵

Feminist readings

Although Varda is recognized as an early figure of feminist filmmaking, Le Bonheur was frequently criticized for an ostensibly anti-feminist message. The film scholar Rebecca J. DeRoo of Washington University in St. Louis argues that Varda drew specific imagery from French women's magazines that idealized housework and applied it to her characters to challenge feminine ideals, and that the film expands on Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963). On this reading, Varda used a strategy of visual irony that disputes the film's own narrative surface and conservative notions of domestic harmony.⁸ DeRoo summarizes the earlier reception this way: "Because Varda entered clichés of domesticity in order to challenge them, Le Bonheur has been dismissed as a product of the feminine culture it questioned."⁹

Later critics have read the film as a covert parody of the male protagonists of New Wave cinema: François's naive optimism and superficiality mirror the attitudes of the men in films by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, whose women are often inscrutable objects of romantic interest. Others, such as the San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle, have called it a "stealth bomb" feminist film whose anger is easy to miss because Varda seems to accept her male protagonist.^{9 • 10} A King's College London study argues that the film undermines the patriarchal roles of mistress and mother/wife, its grim assessment forming a chiaroscuro with the film's Pop Art aesthetics.¹¹

Standing

In the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the greatest films of all time, Le Bonheur was ranked joint 152nd.¹² The Criterion Collection released a restoration supervised and approved by Varda, and critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum have placed it among her best and most interesting features, alongside Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond.^{3 • 13}

References

1. Le Bonheur, Turner Classic Movies article by Margarita Landazuri (2015)
2. Notice bibliographique Le bonheur, Bibliothèque nationale de France
3. Le bonheur (1965), The Criterion Collection
4. Le bonheur, Film at Lincoln Center
5. Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965), La Cinémathèque française
6. le Bonheur, Larousse, Dictionnaire mondial des films
7. Le Bonheur, cinéma-francais.fr
8. Rebecca J. DeRoo, "Unhappily ever after: visual irony and feminist strategy in Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur", Studies in French Cinema 8.3 (2008)
9. Pate Duncan, "On Picnics and Rotten Fruit: Varda's Le Bonheur", UW Cinematheque
10. Mick LaSalle, "Agnes Varda's 'Le Bonheur,' a subtle blast of feminist anger from 1965", San Francisco Chronicle (2020)
11. "Mother and Lover Equals Other: Varda's Mortal Critique of the Feminine as Annex to the Masculine Subject", King's College London
12. Le Bonheur (1965), British Film Institute
13. Le bonheur (1965) critic reviews, MUBI

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1960 to 1965

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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