Bigger Than Life Presents: Le Bonheur
“I imagined a summer peach with its perfect colors, and inside, there is a worm.”
- Agnès Varda
Young carpenter François and his wife Thérèse lead an seemingly idyllic life with their two children in a small suburb outside of Paris. When François meets an attractive post office employee while working in the next town over, he casually begins an affair that he believes can only supplement his existing happiness.
Filled with sunshine, flowers and picture-perfect picnics, Agnès Varda’s 1965 Le Bonheur (Happiness) is a piercing, radical work that unfurls with a sense of deadpan horror as it explores both the hypocrisies of the sexual revolution and the traps of the nuclear family.
Varda was a founding member of the French New Wave and a pivotal part of Paris’ Left Bank Cinema. Her third feature is one of her most visually lavish films, utilising to devastating effect the pastoral setting of Fontenay-aux-roses and the lush gardens of the Île-de-France that so inspired the Impressionists.
Bigger Than Life presents this screening of
Le Bonheur (Happiness) with an introduction by Agnès Varda expert, Hazel Shaw.
All of our screenings are 18+ unless otherwise stated, and the film start time is as advertised above.
*Content Warnings: Nudity, suicide
- Runtime: 80 minutes
- Director: Agnès Varda
- Cast: Jean-Claude Drouot, Claire Drouot, Marie-France Boyer
- Country: France
- Year: 1965