La Pointe Courte

La Pointe Courte (1955) was shown in the U.S. with its original French title. It was written and directed by Agnès Varda.

Although this was Varda's first film, she already had the uncanny knack of knowing how to film intensely personal moments, how to film small group discussions, and how to film crowd scenes. She wanted to write about the village of La Pointe Courte, but instead decided to make a movie. She borrowed money, and she made this movie. Clearly, she was a genius, and we can see that when we watch to film.

The acting in the film was at a high level. Most of the actors were nonprofessionals, who lived in the fishing village of La Pointe Courte.

However, the two leads: Philippe Noiret as Lui, and Silvia Monfort as Elle, were professional actors. (Although Noiret went on to become one of France's most popular actors, this was his first major role. Monfort was a professional who, by 1955, had already worked in theater and cinema.)

What makes the movie unique is that it blended one plot--an ethnographic vision of the small fishing village--with another very personal plot. In the latter plot, Noiret and Monfort play a married couple who have come from Paris to La Pointe Courte, where the husband was born. They are having an existential crisis. That always sounds pretentious, but I really think it fits in this case. Husband and wife are questioning their nature as individual human beings, their relationship as a couple, and whether they still truly love each other.

They rent a room in La Pointe Courte, and then they talk. (Remember, this is a French film--an early example of what became the French Cinematic New Wave . That means the couple don't kiss, they don't make love, they don't fish or swim--they talk about their relationship.)

Meanwhile, on the ethnographic side of the film, the people live hardscrabble lives because their income depends on the uncertainties of fishing. They are in a constant cat-and-mouse game with the public health authorities and the police, because they sometimes fish in contaminated water. As one character says, "Yes, the water is contaminated, but I haven't heard of anyone dying because they ate our fish."

The good news is that the villagers help one another. It's clearly a cooperative situation, and that's how they survive. However, their life is hard, and they're always one step away from disaster.

Philippe Noiret, even as a young man of 25, gives us the first view of the talent that he developed over the years. Monfort was his equal as an actor. She was 32 when the film was completed, but looked no older than Noiret. She had an unusual beauty, unlike the perfect beauty of Catherine Deneuve. In fact, Monfort looks like an actor Ingmar Bergman would have chosen to star in one of his films.

People have pointed out that some of the shots in La Pointe Courte resemble Ingmar Bergman's work. The fact is that Bergman's film Persona, which clearly has some similar shots, was completed in 1966, 11 years after Varda's film. My compliments to Bergman, who had the genius to recognize greatness in another director.

In many ways, the French Cinematic New Wave was a cooperative enterprise. The great director Alain Resnais was the editor of La Pointe Courte. Resnais had trained as an editor, but was already directing his own films in 1955. We can't tell how much his expertise helped fledgling filmmaker Varda, but my guess would be that his contribution was substantial.

We saw this film as part of an Agnès Varda retrospective in the wonderful Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. It would be better to see it on the large screen. However, if that's not an option, see it on the small screen. This film is both an aesthetic pleasure and a movie of historical importance. If you love cinema, this film is a must!

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's career began by the seaside in a small fisher port near Sète and temporarily ended in 2009 with "Les Plages D'Agnès" (Agnès' Beaches). Her debut was a commercial fiasco, only one theater in Paris showed it when it was released (Jean Louis Chéret, Studio-Parnasse).

The part of the man was first intended for George Wilson but he became ill and Philippe Noiret replaced him. This actor didn't like his performance, he thought he was too young (26) and the choice of Wilson was relevant (34). He said he was absent and the character eluded him. The critics thrashed him.

Hailed as the first movie of the Nouvelle Vague, the movie owes at least as much to Italian Neo-realism (Rossellini's "Viaggio In Italia" which depicted a couple's trip whose marriage was on the rocks and Visconti's "La Terra Trema" which dealt with the plight of the fishermen in a small village).

What is definitely "Nouvelle Vague" is the shoestring budget (four times less than "Breathless") and the literary, intellectual, "overwritten" dialogs which seem today almost unbearable; this bourgeois couple complaining about their heartaches, contemplating their navels, walks through the crowd as if the inhabitants of the village didn't exist. They don't relate to them: the only move the man makes is to give an ice-cream to a child. That's not much for someone who spent his whole childhood in the place. Filming on location wasn't the Nouvelle Vague's invention as too many naive people still believe today; for the record "l'Hirondelle Et La Mésange" was filmed entirely on location in...1928.

The depiction of the village wanders drastically from the precepts of the Nouvelle Vague busy being born but recalls the two Italian works mentioned above. We feel that Varda cares for them even if her two principals don't. She cares for their problems with the food hygiene people or with the coastguards'. She feels for Raphaël the young man to be jailed for five days as the gendarmes do for him. We learn he is an Inscrit Maritime (that was the name of the conscripts who lived on the seaside) and he is to do his military service: even if Varda doesn't mention it, we do know he'll have to fight in a dirty war (the Algeria war), like Antoine in "Cleo De 5 à 7".

I don't think like the precedent user that Varda's debut was her best. Actually "Cléo..." is much better. There are similarities between the two works: both Cléo and the couple move in a world they can't relate to. But the key to the 1961 effort is the fact that Cléo opens up and thanks to a soldier soon returning to fight becomes aware that people exist outside her petty world. When she takes her glasses off, what a symbol! But for the man and the woman of "La Pointe Courte" (The Short Headland) -they are only referred through this, bearing no names- they will stay with their inflated egos, their selfishness.

"They are always talking, they mustn't be happy" says a fisher's wife.

The short headland was a blind alley.

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.

We fail to understand love means different things for different people. The way to deal with your problems define us and our journey of the life. Hastiness never works, it might seem it solved your issues for a moment. People tend to busy themselves with the things so they forget about the problems but does that solve the problem, no. We can always come to the better result, if we do it with pure of hearts and calmly. Let everyone have their say, with no threats. But are we really pure at heart.