La Pointe Courte

Agnes Varda never got her just due for having made the first true film of the French New Wave. Part of it was because this picture didn't get much play at the time - even in France, but, a larger factor was that she wasn't as tight with the Truffuat and Godard Cahiers du Cinema clique who also got the first wide attention with films like 400 BLOWS and BREATHLESS. And, oh yes, she was a woman. History aside, Varda's debut feature displays attributes associated with the Nouvelle Vague so prominently, that it is indeed a shame that she isn't properly credited. The low budget shooting on the run, the elliptical dialogue between the lead couple (Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort) and the often off-kilter stylish compositions and editing. The score is largely a droning clarinet. It's all there in LA POINTE COURTE. Varda's interest in photography which led to her career-long interest in Documentary filmmaking also marks the film, for the central romance shares time equally with a portrait of the tiny fishing community where it's set (the Noiret character's hometown). The ambitions of the film are small, but, it's still quite a low key delight. It should be better known and recognized as the true start of that famous French filmmaking Revolution.

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.

This film, Varda's directorial debut, is as impressive and accomplished as any of the other New Wavers' debuts. It's definitely on the same level as Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, or Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Resnais actually worked as the editor for this film). I actually think I prefer it to all three of those (as well as the other three films of Varda's that I've seen). Historically, it's one of the most fascinating films I've ever witnessed. It, in one of its two sections, sprouts from a mixture of both French Poetic Realism of the 1930s and Italian Neorealism in the 1940s. It contains the social drama of such Neorealism classics as Visconti's La Terra Trema, as this plotline deals with a group of poor fishermen and their families. However, Varda doesn't play this hand melodramatically at all. Even when a character dies, we only witness his mourning in a precisely documentarian way. We aren't asked to feel any real emotion for him, which, for some reason, makes it all the more profound. In this way, the film resembles the French poetic realism classics. L'Atalante is clearly echoed, as stray cats occupy many empty spaces in the composition; they appear in nearly every scene in some capacity. Also, the village festival that takes up most of its tail end resembles very much the folksy rural wedding at the beginning of L'Atalante. The film also contains the good humor of Vigo's masterpiece. The second half of the film alternates with the first, switching over exactly every ten minutes, a technique which Varda kind of pilfered from William Faulkner's Wild Palms (aka If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem), a novel which Godard brings up in two of his films, Breathless and Two or Three Things I Know About Her. This second half points toward the future. The French New Wave, just getting underway in 1956 (although the program notes that I received insisted that it was made in 1954), comes to full bloom here. This half, which deals with a husband and wife who have started to grow tired of each other, consists of beautifully choreographed and composed shots of the two lovers strolling along the beaches of the fishing town. The style here is instantly recognizable as one which Resnais would adopt in Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, and even has that semi-resigned feeling to it, as if, in a way, it's half-joking. What's really shocking is that this section does not just predict some of the techniques of the French New Wave, but also the style of Ingmar Bergman's films. I would doubt that Bergman was influenced at all by this film, as it's doubtful he ever saw it. Besides, he was well on his way to hitting his peaks by 1954, as we can see from such early masterpieces as Sawdust and Tinsel. But there are some shots in this film that, once again, will instantly call to mind nearly identical ones from films such as The Seventh Seal and, even more so, Persona.

While it's a lot of fun to identify these old and new (and future) trends in La Pointe Courte, the film more than stands up on its own. Besides, according to the program notes, Agnès Varda was no great cinephile, unlike the other French New Wavers. The two storylines, and their differing styles, complement each other perfectly. It helps that Varda's direction is impeccable. Before she came to the cinema, she was a photojournalist, and it's extremely obvious. Her composition is absolutely stunning, with a lot of concentration on surface textures. The film opens with a tight close-up of a handcrafted wooden chair. You can't tell what it is initially, but as the camera follows the grooves and backs up, the object is revealed for what it is. When one character goes to the train station to pick up his wife, the shot is absolutely award-worthy with its multiple diagonals in the train tracks and the power lines in the distance. The use of sound in the film is also amazing. It's interesting when sound effects are included and when they're occluded. When the married couple walks through a field, there are carts squeaking down rusty tracks (it's a very odd event, but quite remarkable to see and hear). But later, when a large train passes by them only a dozen feet away, we don't hear it at all. Godard would play with sound more thoroughly, but never as subtly.

It's a rather great tragedy that La Pointe Courte has gone almost entirely unavailable. It barely got a release when it was first made, and, even after Varda gained prominence in the French cinema, it seems to have effectively dropped off the face of the planet. I hope that someday there will be a full retrospective of her work on DVD. This film deserves to impress others as much as it impressed me. 10/10.

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.

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?