“Show the Clichés:” the Appearance of Happiness in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur

Abstract Le Bonheur, perhaps Agnès Varda’s most beautiful film, is also her most perplexing. The film’s insistently idyllic surface qualities, overtly beautiful imagery, and psychologically impenetrable, improbably content characters mystify and confuse. Of late, feminist scholars have clarified the situation, noting Varda’s incorporation of advertising and pop cultural visual rhetoric to implicate the social forces framing the picture and those insistently “happy” people: more like advertising ciphers than dramatic characters. Varda herself referenced Impressionist painting as a source of the film’s aesthetics. The purposes of this vivid, chromatic intertextual and intermedial source, in relation to the rhetoric of commercial and popular culture, demand attention. Varda studied art history and connected the milieu of Le Bonheur, the Parisian exurbs, their petit-bourgeois and working-class populace, and bucolic leisure, artisanal and industrial settings, to the modernity of 19th-century Impressionism. Le Bonheur uses an Impressionist picturesque dialectically, in relation to a pop contemporaneity, to observe and critique an ideological genealogy of capitalism and its oppression of women.