Le Bonheur 1965

Varda does not paint François as a malicious villain or a scheming psychopath. He is genuinely gentle, affectionate, and well-meaning. This makes the film’s conclusion even more terrifying: the patriarchy does not require cruelty to crush women; it only requires ordinary, self-absorbed compliance. François's happiness is absolute because the world is built to cater to his desires at the direct expense of female individuality. A Feminist Response to New Wave Male Tropes

Varda famously compared the film to “a summer fruit with perfect colors, inside of which is a worm.” Decades after its release, Le Bonheur remains a shockingly radical text that continues to spark fierce debate among film scholars and audiences alike. The Illusion of Total Harmony le bonheur 1965

While François falls asleep under the trees, Thérèse wanders off. Shortly after, François wakes up to find her body being dragged from a nearby lake. Whether her drowning was an tragic accident or a deliberate suicide remains one of the film’s haunting ambiguities. Varda does not paint François as a malicious

Le Bonheur was Varda's first feature in color, a decision she used to devastating effect. The film's visual language is a direct contrast to its thematic heart, creating a constant, unsettling irony. The cinematography, by Claude Beausoleil and Jean Rabier, bathes every frame in the saturated, vibrant hues of a post-Impressionist painting, with cinematographers calling the look "the muted pastels and luxuriant soft-focus". Flowers, sunlight, and nature are ever-present, creating a vision of earthly paradise. Varda was directly inspired by the pastoral paintings of the French Impressionists and Jean Renoir's Picnic in the Grass . François's happiness is absolute because the world is

Varda, as a female director working in the French New Wave’s male-dominated orbit, uses the film’s formal beauty as a trap. The viewer is seduced by the same pleasures that blind François. We are lulled by the sunshine and Mozart, only to realize we have been complicit in a vision of happiness that is fundamentally sociopathic. The film does not moralize; it presents. It asks us: is happiness that requires no sacrifice, no negotiation, no empathy, actually happiness? Or is it merely the absence of conflict, a fragile shell over an abyss of meaninglessness? By the final picnic, Le Bonheur has transformed from a luminous fable into a horror film—not of ghosts or monsters, but of the terrifying ease with which life goes on, and the profound, unacknowledged cost of a joy that refuses to be troubled by love.

As Thérèse navigates her newfound freedom, she grapples with the societal expectations placed upon her as a wife and mother. Through her journey, Varda critiques the traditional roles assigned to women in French society during the 1960s, highlighting the constraints and limitations that women faced.