Tonight I went back to the CSUN Cinematheque (the new version) to see a film by French director Agnes Varda called "La Pointe Courte" (1955). Varda's name is well known to cinephiles, but I for one had never seen any of her work and I finally had a chance to remedy that. Professor Frances informed us beforehand that Varda was considered by critics as notable as Roger Ebert, among others, to be the originator of the French New Wave movement of the late 50s through the early 70s. She may not have set out to create a new style of artistic filmmaking because she went on to become known mainly as a documentarian, but it seems that "La Pointe", her debut film, did indeed influence the vanguards of the New Wave such as Godard and Truffaut, et al.
The first thing you notice, from the opening shot of the movie, is that Varda is an excellent photographer. The camerawork in this film is imaginitive throughout, full of fluid motion, unexpected angles and stark close ups inside the cramped shacks in which the villagers of the French coastal town of La Pointe Courte live. The people are as poor as church mice. A family with seven children resides in a space not much bigger than my own Tiny Apartment. Fortunately, the sea is their front yard. The women spend much of their time outside, hanging the wash and talking as their children play. The men all work as fishermen, casting a wide ring of nets each day to trap shellfish. The poverty stricken town, however, lies next to a polluted section of the ocean (as poverty and pollution often go together, see Flint, Michigan), and the local Health Department inspectors are always after the fishermen for breaking the rules of fishing in the wrong lagoon. Their catches are inspected for bacteria. One man is taken to jail for five days. All of this is meant to show a way of life rather than to serve as a plot, and in this way Varda's style resembles that of the earlier cinematic art form of Italian Neo-Realism, which developed in the aftermath of WW2, headed up by directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio Di Sica. The bulk of her cast is made up of non-actors, who play the seaside villagers to great effect, as that is probably who they were in real life.
Only two professional actors are listed in the credits for the film on IMDB : the great French star Phillipe Noiret, a big man with a hang dog face in later years who appeared in many classic Chabrol films and other French flicks of the 70s. Here he is a young man with a Julius Caesar haircut, married to a beautiful and sophisticated Parisian woman played by an actress named Sylvia Monfort. The couple act out an alternate, philosophical storyline set against the daily life of the fishermen. Noiret hails from the village but has been living in Paris with his wife for the past four years. They return to La Pointe Courte so that Noiret can show Monfort his roots. He is from poverty, and though he escaped it, he retains a simple, non-ambitious philosophy of life. She is from Paris, a worldly city of ideas and accomplishment. Their marriage is on the rocks when they arrive at the village. Monfort tells Noiret that she wants a separation. Slowly, though, he talks her out of it, using logic to examine the nature of their love and also to explain to her the nature of her restless neuroses.
If you have ever seen a parody of European Art House Existentialist Love Scenes, maybe from Saturday Night Live, and maybe based on Bergman's films, with a couple's heads filmed close up and at right angles to one another (or variations of such a shot), while they spout dry readings of lines of dialogue on the meaning of love, well.....it seems that all those perpendicular camera angles on those heads, and all of that existentialism came from this film by Agnes Varda, before it ever came from Ingmar Bergman. He made films prior to 1955, but none had this signature two-shot, which later became famous enough for satire. I did not know that Varda invented it, but she did.
So, as the fishermen and their families battle the health inspectors and sort their scallops, and dance and party as poor people do on the weekends, the couple Noiret and Monfort wander through the village engaged in a neverending discussion of love and it's meaning, and who loves who more, and why, and why not. Their expressions are flat throughout by design. Varda wanted a flat reading of the ultimate emotional subject and it became a style of it's own for later filmmakers.
"La Pointe Courte" is a unique film combining neorealism, an idea for discontinuous story structure that begat the French New Wave, a theme of emotional existentialism, and tremendous photography. Varda was also a talented still photographer, known almost as much for her work in that field as for her films.
I give it Two Big Thumbs Up. It's a quirky film with an off-kilter clarinet score accentuating the action throughout, and it has no big storyline or plot or payoff......but it is a film that combined different elements began a style of Pure Cinema, literally filming stuff that just plain looked good and worked well onscreen. Jean-Luc Godard took Pure Cinema to an extreme, but Agnes Varda introduced it here in her first film. She is now 89 years old and still working.
That's all for tonight. See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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