A Complicated Passion: On Carrie Rickey’s Agnès Varda Biography
Carrie Rickey (l.) and Molly Haskell discuss Rickey’s new Agnès Varda biography at Film at Lincoln Center on September 17, following a screening of Le Bonheur.
A sunlit pastorale, bursting with color and scored to Mozart, Agnès Varda’s beautiful and disturbing Le Bonheur (1966), a tale of adultery committed by a narcissist who believes he is harmlessly adding joy to his already happy married life, was written by Varda in a 72-hour rage-fueled creative burst. According to Carrie Rickey, author of the lively, insightful new biography A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda, the rage may have come from pain of rejection. Her husband Jacques Demy’s film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg had just won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. Meanwhile, her own script (for the film that would eventually become Les créatures) was turned down by the Centre National du Cinéma. Or perhaps—suggested Rickey in a recent conversation with Molly Haskell following a screening of Le Bonheur at Film at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater—the rage simply reflected Varda’s general anger towards French men.
Le Bonheur
Varda famously described Le Bonheur as a “summer peach, with its perfect colors, and inside there’s a worm.” That we are meant to take the title (which means “happiness”) with a big grain of salt is evident. Purposely left unclear are the reasons behind the characters’ actions, which lead to a tragedy followed by an unsettling happy/not-happy coda. Rickey agreed with Haskell that Varda wasn’t interested in psychology. According to Haskell, the film is “psychologically impenetrable. I saw this when it opened and I thought it was one of the strangest films I had ever seen, and I still think so.” Rickey called the film a Rorschach Test, eliciting wildly different reactions. She noted that Chantal Akerman said “it was the most anti-romantic film there is…it was very daring at the time.” A New York Times ad used a William Wolf quote calling the film “an unusual tour de force bound to thrust moviegoers into opposing camps.” (The film did strike a chord; it played continuously in Montreal for more than a year, in Buenos Aires for nine months, and in Tokyo for six months.)
The marital tension in Le Bonheur may also reflect one of the key “complicated passions” that Rickey explores in her wonderfully researched book; Varda’s marriage to Demy. Each was bisexual, which they both accepted, but there were struggles when it came to balancing their marriage with their personal desires and their differences. After all, as Rickey said, “He was a devout Catholic and she was a devout pagan.”
Many of Varda’s films grapple with gender inequality, the ways that society tends to offer men more opportunity for happiness than women. Indeed, gender inequality had a strong impact on the trajectory of Varda’s career. While her ruggedly beautiful, audacious 1955 film Le Pointe Courte is now widely considered a key precursor of the French New Wave, Varda was for many years treated as a Left Bank footnote to more famous directors—all men. James Monaco’s 1974 book The New Wave focuses on Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, and Chabrol, with almost no mention of Varda.
Varda, who outlived all of these directors, died at 90 in 2019, and continued working until three days before her death. In her final years, Varda’s reputation soared, thanks to her tremendous productivity (including her Oscar-nominated Faces Places in 2017) and to widespread appreciation for the modernity and enduring brilliance of her work. Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962), which feels bracingly modern today with the vibrant collision of fiction and documentary elements that defined Varda’s entire oeuvre, placed 14th on Sight and Sound’s 2022 Critics List of the Greatest Films of All Time, well above any other French New Wave film (Breathless placed 38th). As Rickey points out in a key comparison, all of Varda’s films are, with some exceptions “rooted in reality. Demy created his own world; Varda was inspired by the world.” Rickey’s book details many of Varda’s life experiences, including, for example, the months she spent as a teenager, living and working with a group of fishermen. She shows how Varda channeled her life into her art. As artistically accomplished as her films are, they are living organisms. They all breathe with spontaneity and freedom. As Varda said, “Chance is my greatest assistant.”
Varda and Mike Nichols at the May 23, 1966 premiere of Le Bonheur at the FIne Arts Theater in Manhattan. According to Molly Haskell, Nichols cried after seeing the film.