Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Happiness
1965 · Agnès Varda · Happiness on Sightlines
A scene ends, and the screen doesn't go black. It floods red.
The next one ends and it goes blue. Nobody was punctuating a film this way in 1965. A fade to black is a full stop: that happened, time has passed, here comes the next thing. Varda's fades refuse to be neutral. The family walks out of the summer woods and their pleasure stays behind without them, a flat field of pigment with nobody left in it to own the feeling.
Deleuze has a name for colour used like this. In his account of the affection-image — the close-up country of cinema, where a feeling gets registered on screen but not yet spent in action — colour can stop describing objects and start swallowing them. He calls the function absorbent. The blue is not the blue of anything. Jean Rabier's Eastmancolor isn't reporting on a sky or a dress; it has lifted the scene's emotion off the actors and made it the surface we are looking at. And what it absorbs is the thing the title names. Deleuze's term for a quality or an intensity presented for its own sake, detached from anyone who might be having it, is qualité-puissance, quality-power. Happiness in this film is not François's property. It is a colour the film can turn on.
Hold that, and the oldest argument about Le Bonheur starts to look like the wrong argument. People have been asking since 1965 whether Varda approves of this man, whether the smile is his or hers, whether a satire forgot to sting. Try a better question. Where in this film is the happiness actually located? Not in a character. It is in the light, the Mozart, the pigment. That is a colder finding than any verdict, and she reaches it without one line of commentary.
Then there is his face. Jean-Claude Drouot's beauty is doing structural work. Deleuze splits the filmed face in two. There is the face as a reflecting surface, held nearly immobile, expressing a single quality — wonder, contemplation, here plain contentment — and there is the face of features, where small movements accumulate toward a threshold that something will cross. François is the first kind from beginning to end. Nothing in him ever builds. He loves Thérèse; he comes to love the woman at the post office; he sees no contradiction, because in his arithmetic happiness simply adds. A face able to register a contradiction would need features that fight each other. His doesn't. This is the most beautiful film ever made about male self-regard, and this is where it keeps the poison: in a contour that never breaks.
Now her sharpest move. In Deleuze's grammar of action there is a figure called the index of equivocity: a single act that could belong to two entirely different situations, shown without telling you which. Le Bonheur is built out of them. A man's arms around his children in dappled light is an image of devotion, and it is also, unaltered, the image of a man who takes whatever is in front of him and calls the taking love. Varda does not offer two versions of the shot. There is one shot. Then she went further and cast Drouot's actual wife and actual children, so the equivocity sits in the material and not only in our reading: those really are that child's father's arms, and they are also the performance of a man's lie about himself.
Which hands the burden to you. That is the design. Deleuze's third region of the image, Thirdness, the relation-image, is where meaning stops being on screen and starts living in the relations the audience brings. Varda's inheritance here is explicit. Renoir's Une partie de campagne (1936) gave French cinema the riverside picnic as a living Impressionist canvas, sun-dazzled, natural-lit, and the dappled picnic has meant love ever since. Deleuze would call an image with that kind of settled habit behind it a mark: you read it by custom, because you know what usually follows. A demark is the anomaly that snaps the habit and makes you interpret. Varda's demark is that nothing looks anomalous. The Renoir picnic arrives intact, ravishing, and the content inside it has gone cold. You supply the judgment, because the film has walked out of the room where judgment would be delivered.
She does keep watching him. Coming off Cléo de 5 à 7, where she and Rabier worked out a near-real-time following of a protagonist, she turns that observational eye onto a husband, and you feel the camera doing it. That sensation of a camera perceiving a character who is himself busy perceiving is Deleuze's dicisign, and it is why the film never reads as endorsement even while it withholds the blade. Varda lends François her light and her music; the frame keeps its distance. Pasolini in the mid-sixties named this fusion the free indirect subjective, an author's vision and a character's folded into one image with neither cancelled. Put it back in the room it was made in and it carries a charge. The only woman at the centre of the New Wave gives a man the entire visible surface of a film about male self-regard and never once speaks over him. Criticism needed another decade to build the vocabulary for what she had already made.
Notice what she refuses, too. The naturalist option was right there: appetite as a drive, a man on a downward slope, the ugly root under the lawn. That film would have been comfortable. Its form would have handed down the punishment and let 1965 go home satisfied. Varda gives him good weather instead. No slope, no shadow in the grain, and Mozart not commenting on him but agreeing with him.
The debts, precisely. Renoir for the picnic as canvas. Sirk's All That Heaven Allows for the melodrama tactic of hyper-saturated domestic prettiness turned against the cruelty living inside it, the exact gap she widens. Her own La Pointe Courte for setting documentary texture against a stylized couple's drama, which hardens here into painterly blocks. Hiroshima mon amour for Left Bank cutting that binds image to music associatively rather than by continuity, which is what lets the Mozart-scored colour passages move the way they do. Demy's Lola for the enchanted, non-judging fairy-tale register she keeps and then fills with arithmetic.
What it did to film: it proved a picture can hold back its verdict and still be lethal, and that the moral weight can be carried by colour, by the pigment that ends a scene, rather than by anything a character says or suffers. Any later film that lets a beautiful surface deliver a cruel content with no cutaway to reassure you is drawing on credit Varda opened here.
So watch the fades. When the red comes up, ask whose feeling that is. If the answer is nobody's, you have found the blade. And then the question she leaves standing: what would this film be if she had allowed one single shot to disagree with him?
Concepts in play
- affective colour (the colour-image) — Rabier's Eastmancolor fades scenes into washes of pure red and blue where other films fade to black — colour absorbing the scene's emotion instead of describing objects in it.
- qualité-puissance (quality-power) — Happiness is presented as a pure intensity belonging to no one — carried by the summer light, the Mozart and the colour fields rather than by any character's state.
- reflexive vs intensive face — Jean-Claude Drouot's handsome, good-natured face never once drops the smile and never crosses a threshold: all contour, no features in conflict, so no contradiction can register on it.
- index of equivocity — One unaltered image of the carpenter adoring his wife and children in the woods reads equally as devotion and as appetite — and Varda cast Drouot's real wife and children, putting the double reading into the material itself.
- the relation-image (Thirdness) — Varda refuses to editorialize and lets the light and colour do the indicting, so the film's moral content exists only in the relations the viewer supplies.
- demark — The inherited Renoir picnic tableau (Une partie de campagne) arrives perfectly intact as a guarantee of love while its content has gone cold — the habit is broken by nothing looking broken.
- dicisign — The observational, near-real-time following of a protagonist worked out with Rabier on Cléo de 5 à 7 becomes a watchful eye on the husband; we feel the camera perceiving a man who is perceiving.
- free indirect discourse (the camera speaking-for) — The lone woman at the heart of the New Wave gives a man the film's whole ravishing surface — her light, her Mozart — without ever speaking over him, fusing her vision with his while cancelling neither.