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It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Agnès Varda's third feature LE BONHEUR, which means "happiness", starts as a mellifluous, twee collage of vignettes fetchingly limning the Chevaliers's tenor of life, a nuclear family of four, François and Thérèse and their two toddlers (played by real-life couple Jean-Claude and Claire Drouot with their kids Olivier and Sandrine), he is a carpenter and she is a dressmaker, inhabiting in their small house but their life is brimful of hygge. François is a gladsome lad, when he chances upon Émilie Savignard (Boyer) who works in the post office, their mutual attraction inevitably leads to physical engagement, but there is no lie to compound this adulterous affair, François is bluff about his married status, and his polyamorous theory (he loves both Thérèse and Émilie, the only reason he cannot stay with the latter can be boiled down to a simple fact, he meets the former first) finds a fitting audience in Émillie, who, apart from bandying about that she feels unhappy when he is with his family, doesn't resolve to act as a home-wrecker. To assuage his guilty feeling, during a family outing in their old haunting, the luxuriant countryside which opens the film, François confesses to Thérèse his extramarital activity and guilelessly pleads her that nothing will change for her and their family's sake, and apparently Thérèse takes the news in her stride, they even enjoy a roll in the hay alfresco. Up to this point, Varda profusely swamps audience with her gleeful chirpiness, archly experiments many a trick to leaven up its straightforward narrative, often in concert with allegro passages (Mozart's pieces): quick jump cuts of furniture incessantly breaks a fluid directness when François visits Émilie's apartment for the first time; previously, in the scene where they attempt their first date outside a bar, Varda alters the focuses of close-ups to the periphery, prompts a documentary spontaneity; not to mention a coup de maître when she pans the camera behind a bole, forges a long shot to-and-fro in observing the partner-swapping pas-de-deux, intimating the state of affairs tongue-in-cheek. A seismic kicker (although the causation is never explicitly laid bare) actualizes itself inadvertently which clears the hindrance of François and Émelie's union, here Varda, in her extraordinary sense of downplaying opprobrium, lets the banality cast a clouded shadow onto the story, Émelie, who avers earlier that she doesn't want to be anyone's replacement, takes up the motherly role with alacrity, and the film ends in the same exuberant mise-en-scène, a renewed family of four sauntering in the woods, all is fine, but is it? Covering her beneficent reproach toward a woman's replace-ability and a man's fun-seeking naiveté, with sublime visual affinity and chromatic repose, Varda's LE BONHEUR is an innately rapier-like but externally glacé critique, her feminine intuition and tangibility proves why petticoat ingenuity is a game-changer in our cinematic progression, a tenet worthy of our unconditional espousal.

Le Bonheur is, in my opinion, one of Varda's most underrated films, partially due to the fact that it was not distributed in the USA until the 1990s. Another reason is that Le Bonheur potentially contradicts --or at least complicates -- Varda's legacy as a feminist New Wave filmmaker. This film is about the human condition... a condition as elusive as the film's underlying message. One of the most unique features of Le Bonheur is its ability to implicate the viewer into the interpretation of the film. In other words, how you react to this film depends on your own, pre-determined values and morals. Varda's narrative is open-ended enough to allow for a variety of interpretations. Even the film's lyrical and poetic treatment of the story could be interpreted as either an act of bitter cynicism, or as a matter-of-fact statement about the cyclical nature of life.

Watching this film the last time, some 45 years ago, upon it's original UK release, I was blown away. I felt I had never seen such beautiful sunny summer images, I was astonished at the use of posters and advertising hoardings for composition. I notice now that some of these aspects have coloured my own photographic sensitivities. I remember the film as one long celebration of happiness and the suggestion that with the right attitude life would be like this. Seeing it again, it is still undoubtedly beautiful and I possibly appreciate even more the wonderful cinematography, however, now I notice how subversive this movie is. I have a feeling that this is very much a personal film seen through Varda's eyes and she is suggesting that a woman might easily do as the second woman does in this without causing so much as a head to turn. I think not, this is fantasy. The guy is unreal, men don't lie around saying how happy they are all the time, never mind the way he fails to be affected by the incident. I imagine at the time I saw this as a depiction of a real possibility. I seem to remember thinking lots of things were possible in the 60s that have turned out not to be. Nevertheless, this is still a beautiful movie,

"It all adds up", says Francois to his mistress Emilie, explaining why he can love her and his wife Therese and his children equally. In her brilliant and provocative 1965 film, Le Bonheur, Agnes Varda (The Gleaners and I, Vagabond, Cleo From 5 to 7), raises the question of whether "open marriage" can work and answers it with a definite "maybe". As the film opens, a carpenter, Francois (Jean-Claude Drouot), and his young (real-life) family are experiencing a Sunday afternoon picnic in the park. Shot in pastels and making use of exquisite color fades, Ms. Varda immerses us in the flowers, trees, and lakes of the French countryside. We are lulled by Mozart's languid Clarinet Quintet, yet soon sense that something is amiss. Communication appears superficial and few feelings are expressed. This mood carries over to the scene in their apartment complex where, in a family gathering that includes aunts and uncles, not much happens in the way of conversation. When Francois is away on business, he meets an attractive telephone operator named Emilie. Soon he declares his love for her and claims that he has enough love within him to include her in his life, "I love you both and if I met you first, you would be my wife". Being honest and open, Francois tells Therese that he has loved another woman for over a month, but says that his love for her and his family remains stronger than ever. The love that Francois experiences is - the film states again and again - a natural occurrence, an addition, not a subtraction. However, Therese cannot separate herself from what has become her identity as wife and mother, leading to tragic consequences. She was, in the words of the lovely song, "Tree of Life", "only known as someone's mother, someone's daughter, or someone's wife." At the end of the film, Mozart's Clarinet Quintet is replaced by the darker Adagio and Fugue in C Minor. Francois replaces one woman with another and continues his life without reflection, guilt, or self-doubt. In Le Bonheur, the characters are painfully pure and do not question their actions. Perhaps Ms.Varda is saying that, for Francois, happiness is seamless, that it will continue regardless, and that, in his world, people are simply viewed as interchangeable parts. In Varda's words, happiness is "a beautiful fruit that tastes of cruelty". Agnès Varda's has said, "In my films, I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don't want to show things, but to give people the desire to see". One of the seminal works of the French New Wave, Le Bonheur was audacious in its day and still leaves us unsettled, 37 years later, yet able to see more deeply.