La Pointe Courte

LA POINTE COURTE   ***1/2

Agnès Varda

1955

IDEA:  After many years away, a man returns to the small fishing village where he grew up and converses with his Parisian wife about their declining marriage.

BLURB:  La Pointe Courte is a lovely demonstration of Agnès Varda’s formal ingenuity and boundless curiosity about people and their worlds, presaging yet more complex and adventurous works to come. From the first series of shots, her camera doesn’t so much record the environment from some privileged vantage as inhabit it, feeling around for textures and moods experienced from the inside. It glides patiently down empty streets, snakes through shipyards, and wanders across rooms bustling with children, picking up (or gleaning, to use a word that would later become very significant for Varda) the people and objects, big and small, that constitute a place. This sort of ethnographic observation aligns La Pointe Courte with documentary, allowing whole sequences, often of various kinds of labor, to unfold seemingly unstructured by an outside hand. But Varda counterpoints these scenes with the conspicuously choreographed ones between the two lovers, who strike poses in geometric compositions that make marvelous use of wooden poles, boat hulls, and the bodies of the actors themselves to fragment the frame. If the village-life portions feel neorealist, the self-consciously stylized duets between the lovers augur the coming French New Wave. La Pointe Courte could be watched simply as a ludic experiment in juxtaposing these modes, inviting us into a game of noticing how adventitious forces (animals, crowds, kids) push up against and mix with artistic control. This approach is not merely a matter of aesthetics but ethics, reflecting a democratic worldview of multitudinous authors where no thing and no one is beyond interest.