La Pointe-Courte

Agnes Varda is one of the recipients of AMPAS's Governor's Award this year, so I'll be taking a look at some of her films. I've seen a few, but the only one I've written about on this blog is The Gleaners and I.

Her first film, and one that many consider the proto-New Wave film, is La Pointe-Courte, made in 1954. Varda had no film experience; she didn't even go to that many movies. But inspiration took hold, and she told two stories set in Sete, a fishing village on the south coast of France, particularly a section called La Pointe-Courte.

The film has two parallel stories that are linked only by the location. One is much more successful than the other. The more interesting one is a cinema verite about the villagers, shot like an Italian neo-realist film. Varda uses amateur actors who actually lived there. Their concerns are mostly with the health inspectors who want them to stop fishing in a lagoon that might be contaminated with bacteria. When a man in a suit shows up, the men spring into action--"Probably an inspector," they say.

The other story is a husband and wife. She has arrived by train from Paris to visit him in his home town. They take a long walk and discuss whether they should stay together or not. Much of it looks like a perfume commercial, and there a few shots that are very Bergmanesque--the characters in perpendicular profile, which was used by Bergman in Persona. Of course, Varda did this a decade ahead of Bergman.

Varda, in an interview on the Criterion disc, discusses that she based the structure on William Faulkner's The Wild Palms, which creates a Brechtian distancing effect. I found that was the major problem with the film--I couldn't get into it. There are some lovely moments, such as the women taking their laundry down, or a view through a doorway when a child dies, with the grandmother crying and the villagers filling the doorway. There is also an amusing scene in which men joust while in boats.

I found this film more interesting historically than I did entertaining. Varda said that she was amused by the funny idioms of the people, but that gets lost in translation, except for one line. An older woman says, "We have shit more than half our crap." By golly, she's right.