La Pointe Courte

La Pointe Courte is a small jut of land on the east side of Le Canal de Sète, which connects L'Étang de Thau to the Mediterranean Sea. In the mid-1950s, it harbored a small fishing village (perhaps it still does, for all I know) which provides the setting for this film. Written and directed by 26-year old Agnès (née Arlette) Varda, this, her first and perhaps her best film, is credited by some film critics and historians as the first in the French New Wave.

A young (24) Philippe Noiret plays a native of the village who returns from Paris after many years for a short vacation. Heretofore, I was familiar with Noiret only with some of his much later films. Silvia Monfort, with whom I was previously unfamiliar, and who had one of the most unusual faces I've seen on film, plays the disillusioned Parisian wife who joins him five days later to discuss their marriage.

What's interesting about this film are its two intertwining parts. One part, shot in a familiar narrative style, concerns the everyday life and concerns of the villagers. The other part depicts the conversations of the couple in an artistic style full of fascinating images and interesting camera angles, a style which takes full advantage of Varda's photographer's eye. (Varda used three different cinematographers on this shoot, but I don't know which of them photographed which scenes.)

Varda chose the location for the film after a visit there for an assignment as a still photographer. What I liked best about the part involving just the couple were the slow pans of the environments, almost as if Varda were trying to capture the characters' surroundings in a series of stills. On the other hand, I found somewhat disturbing the obtrusive soundtrack of a clarinet, which went counter to the notion that a soundtrack is supposed to enhance the mood of the scene, not play against it as I found this to do. Perhaps that is part of what accounts for this being credited as a New Wave film.

Highlights:

• Visually often very beautiful.

• The exploration into marriage and what happens to a relationship after the initial thrill, discovery, and romance phase transitions into less pyrotechnics, and just knowing the other person almost as a part of yourself. The woman (Silvia Monfort) misses what she once had, whereas her husband (Philippe Noiret) is more content, and the two talk about it in very honest ways.

• The film seems to be right at the nexus of Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, with interesting aspects of each. It shows us the world of these (real) working class fishermen with their homes filled with kids, and does so with the flair of creative technique. Hooray it was made by a woman director, Agnès Varda.

• Loved the jousting scenes in the canal.

• Also loved the black cat doing an impromptu stretch in the background of one scene, effectively stealing it from the couple.

Lowlights:

• The story is lacking. There's a point in putting the cultural traditions of the fishing villagers and their occasional struggles with life side by side with this couple's difficulties in the cultural tradition of marriage, but the connective tissue is tenuous, and there isn't a lot going on here that's truly compelling.

• While the marital conflict is interesting and the dialogue explores it reasonably well, the way the actors deliver their discussion is so passionless it's as if they were sleepwalking through their roles. I believe it's meant to reflect the state their relationship has gotten to, but I think it was carried a little too far.

• The score is weirdly jaunty, and it's awful. It's almost as if the newness of the film style made figuring out what type of music would go with it a mystery, either that or it was an attempt to breathe life into what is a pretty quiet film. Either way, it doesn't work.

• Did we need the shot of the dead cat?

Agnès Varda began her career in 1954 as a feature film director with this movie that tells two separate stories in reciprocal counterpoint: daily life at a fishing village near Sète in France with its joys and dramatic moments and the relationship between husband and wife when she who is a Parisian returns to him after he had chosen to return to his birthplace where he feels now very happy but that doesn't seem to please her very much at first and puts their marriage in danger. This situation is given in a series of soft dialogues between them which don't reveal themselves deep and meaningful enough to make us feel the sentiments behind them. Varda has done much better later with such very good movies like "Le Bonheur" or "Cléo de 5 à 7". However this movie is also classified as a landmark in the New Wave of French cinema that began about that time with names like Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol. It's this historical value that mainly makes this movie worth to be seen.

I am not a film historian or a fan of Nouvelle Vague. I wanted to see this film because it gave me the opportunity to see my hero, Philippe Noiret, when he was just 26. Thankfully we began by watching the interview w/ Varda, which really gives you a solid understanding of why this film was/is so important, mostly having to do with it being so innovative for its time, and its place as an influence on filmmakers that followed. The 2 story lines did not engage or interest me really.But the visuals were often terrific. And oddly enough, we had just the night before, watched Clash by Night, an American film of the same time which was shot on location in the fishing community of Monterey CA. While visuals were often excellent there as well,in Clash by Night the film really was the STORY, and a very passionate one at that.

La Pointe-Courte was also really important as an example of one of the few important "First Films' of a director,especially a woman director in 1955 , and really especially, one who had no previous experience in film making and no knowledge of film history.

«La Pointe-Courte» was Agnès Varda's first feature film and the first film-manifesto of the "nouvelle vague". In it, Varda broke with some narrative traditions, following neorealist strategies, distancing Bertolt Brecht style and a "mise-en-caméra" close to direct cinema, which was gaining ground around the world at that time, including France where it was euphemistically called "cinéma vérité".

The different influences blend well in the same story, but not all ot them have the same appeal and, in the final analysis, my balance leans more towards the narrative of fiction of anthropological affiliation, than towards the aesthetic compositions of a couple in crisis with which Varda disguises melodrama, aurally reinforced by self-referential declamations of the man and the woman. In fact, in the synopsis that I have read (and in Varda's own words), the story of this couple is taken as the principal storyline, when, in fact, the neighborhood and its fishermen are the true "anti-stars".

With natural actors (the inhabitants of the fishing neighborhood of La Pointe-Courte, in the South of France) Varda tells a story that serves as a unifying thread of the different influences, in which local men insist on fishing in a small contaminated maritime "lagoon" and are consequently persecuted by the Department of Health. At the same time, the filmmaker shows us events that animate their lives: the first love, the patriarchy confrontations, the sporting joust, the death of a child...

On the other hand, Varda, who always alluded to happiness or its absence in her filmography, takes us away from the neorealist liveliness and immerses us in long affective ramblings (which were common in the "nouvelle vague" works, especially in the films by Godard, Rohmer and Resnais), which are nothing more than the process of sentimental adjustment of one La Pointe-Courte native (Philippe Noiret) and his Parisian wife (Silvia Monfort).

As if sensing the strength of the La Pointe-Courte people and their lives, Varda opened and closed the film with images of the neighborhood and its faces: in the first sequence, morning breakfasts are interrupted by the appearance of officials from the Department of Health, and in the end, a popular dance is enlivened by a band that is frozen in the final shot. Without intending to, Agnès Varda left us a moment of film history, of a corner of France, of a popular culture on the coast, as a worthy preamble to her prestigious career.