Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald ou (Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires)

Filmed by Varda at the height of Nouvelle Vague's very short period of success with both critics and audiences, this short is a black and white silent comedy -- incorporated, in a slightly different version, in Varda's first feature "Cléo de 5 à 7" (1962) -- whose major interest today is the presence of a young Jean-Luc Godard (post-Breathless) as the protagonist. Emulating Buster Keaton's deadpan face and Harold Lloyd's fancy-clothed bespectacled romantic, Godard loves, disputes and saves his lovely fiancée, played by his then wife and muse Anna Karina (in a blond wig), and discovers that his somber vision of people and the world may very well be caused by his constant use of...dark-lensed glasses!

Varda tells us in her DVD introduction to this short that she wanted to show her friend Godard's beautiful, sad Buster Keaton eyes, always hidden behind his thick shades in everyday life. And she reveals to us what we've always suspected about JLG: that coupled with that genius wit, robotic voice and viperous lisping tongue there was a pair of sensitive, sad, soulful eyes. The short feels today like a heart-warming photograph of complex people allowing themselves to be slaphappy for a moment (even Eddie Constantine smiles!) and proves Varda's very special talent for capturing people's warmth and life-affirming vocation.

Jean Luc Godard as a version of Harold Lloyd in a very short romantic comedy, in which a pair of dark glasses are the source of sadness and perception in bad perspective.

A nice comedy, for cast - Anna Karina as a lovely doll, Jean Claude Brialy as helper becoming victim of his duty, a lovely chain of cliches and fair - amusing end.

In short, source for smiles and nostalgia.

And good opportunity to rediscover , in nice note, a charming - provocative page of french cinema.

In short, just delightful.

And, maybe, profound useful for... a different perspective, resurrection of good memories and warning about dark glasses.

A young couple kiss on a bridge, and she leaves.... only to be struck down by a man with a hose.

It would be possible, I suppose, to read some great affirmation of Nouvelle Vague principles into this five-minute short subject directed by Agnes Varda, with other members of the French New Wave. However, analysis must begin with recognition of what the evidence is, and the image that the young man affects is not that of Buster Keaton -- he wore a porkpie hat in any case. No, glasses, straw boater (which is what the young man wears) and business suit and tie is the image of Harold Lloyd. Chaplin wore a bowler. So did Laurel & Hardy.

So, is this Varda and her New Wave friends (including Anna Karina and Michel Legrand) contemptuously mocking the old-fashioned film-making that they thought blight French movie-making, by reaching dimly back to the Lumieres' L'AROSEUR AROSE, without bothering to get their references correct? Because they're not worth getting straight? Or just some friends who love movies and movie-making making a movie.

I'm on the side of the latter interpretation.