A Woman’s Truth

Varda’s centering of the male-female couple may appear heteronormative by today’s standards, but in postwar French culture, the (middle-class) couple was a figure of modernity, especially as women were moving into the labor market. Intellectual and artistic celebrity couples—such as Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, or Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet—were in the public eye. Varda’s films demonstrate the ways in which the couple is often biased in favor of the man, who roams the public space freely while the woman is confined at home, bent to repetitive tasks. This dynamic is less apparent in Cléo than in Le bonheur and Les créatures—Cléo does not live with a man as part of a couple. But even she is able to reclaim public space in the second half of the film, after she has shaken off the hold of the men in her life.

Le bonheur is explicitly about a happy, “normal” couple, François and Thérèse, and their two adorable children. The family is played by the actor Jean-Claude Drouot and his real-life wife and children—Varda’s choice was inspired by a magazine feature on Drouot’s “perfect” family. François falls in love with another woman, Émilie, and wishfully believes that he can simply add her to the existing setup. Thérèse initially agrees but is later found drowned (Varda leaves unclear whether this is by suicide or accident), and Émilie gradually replaces her. Under the apparently unruffled surface of the film, with its pastel colors and pretty images of nature underlined by classical music, Varda makes an incisive critique of the patriarchal family structure. Les créatures, too, has a couple at its center: Mylène (Catherine Deneuve), who is mute as a result of a car crash brought about by the criminally irresponsible driving of her husband, Edgar (Michel Piccoli). The husband and wife live on the remote Noirmoutier, where she is locked in the house while he has the run of the island. We gradually understand that he is writing a novel, although the film deliberately blurs reality and fiction. At the end, Edgar finishes his book, while Mylène gives birth to a boy, whereupon she recovers her voice. The film thus seems to equate woman’s procreation with male artistic creation.

Varda’s emphasis on the female body and on motherhood has been more controversial, from a feminist perspective, than the other strands of her engagement with women’s issues, as it runs the risk of gender essentialism. But while she foregrounds the irreducible significance of the body to women’s lives, she never confines their identity to it. Cléo at first superficially equates disease and death with the loss of her beauty but embarks on a journey of self-discovery. In Le bonheur, the “shocking’” substitution of Émilie for Thérèse acknowledges motherhood as a social, not purely biological, function. And the self-conscious theatricality of Les créatures precludes a literal reading—the real conclusion of the film is that Mylène recovers her ability to express herself and, potentially, to escape her husband’s domination.

The three features met with varying degrees of success in their own time. Cléo was much admired when it came out for its penetrating portrait of a woman at a pivotal moment in her life, for its innovative handling of “real” time, and for its historical significance—as Sadoul said, “Ninety minutes in the life of a Parisienne contain the anxieties and preoccupations of a nation.” It was, however, destined to be eclipsed for two decades by the films of Truffaut, Godard, et al. But in the wake of Flitterman-Lewis’s work, it has continued to rise in the firmament of the New Wave, with numerous articles and two books devoted to it (by Valerie Orpen and Steven Ungar). Le bonheur has had a more checkered history. Initially attacked, including by feminists, for perpetuating retrograde patriarchal myths about femininity, it has subsequently been reappraised and is now better understood. By contrast, Les créatures was a critical and box-office flop, despite its starry leads, and remains relatively unknown.

It is remarkable to observe that, even in the earliest days of her career, when Varda was herself young, her interest in women was capacious and prescient enough to include older women—the most invisible category of people in Western culture, as Beauvoir showed in her pioneering 1970 study of aging, The Coming of Age. In L’Opéra-Mouffe; Ô saisons, ô châteaux; Salut les Cubains; and other films, Varda’s camera focuses repeatedly on old people, and especially old women. After Les créatures, she made the short documentary Elsa la rose (1966), in which she dissects the myth of the muse by placing the writer Elsa Triolet, then nearly seventy, at the center of the film, rather than her more famous partner, the surrealist poet Louis Aragon.

In the seventies, the interest in women’s experience that had always been evident in Varda’s films would become more explicitly politicized, and she made films that directly address the impact of the women’s movement—notably, the 1975 short television “cinétract” Réponse de femmes and her 1977 musical about reproductive rights and female friendship, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t. The motif of her centering of older women would also evolve in a natural way: into the late-career string of self-portraits she made as an aging woman in The Gleaners and I (2000), The Beaches of Agnès (2008), Faces Places (2017), and Varda by Agnès (2019). Remarkably, in these films, as in all her work, she avoids pathos and sentimentality; no matter how serious a social issue or personal tragedy she is dealing with, she injects it with her playfully ironic perspective, grace, and humor. Over the course of more than six decades, Varda successfully brought together her feminist politics, her social conscience, and her original artistic practice, resulting in a unique, profoundly meaningful body of cinematic work that was always in search of “a woman’s truth.”