La Pointe Courte Was A Subtly Ambitious And High-Quality Inaugural Directorial Effort For Agnes Varda

While many films detailing a couple going through turmoil in their relationship may depict such upheaval in grandiose ways, like things being flung across the room or large speeches, acclaimed director Agnes Varda went in a different direction. For her very first time directing a feature film, Varda filmed a portrait of quiet romantic agony, one where two people engage in intimate conversations that have them forced to confront where their relationship now stands. The Honeymoon is over, as they say, and it's time for the two lead characters of La Pointe Courte to figure out where exactly they go from here.


Who are these two people in question? Well, one is Elle (Silvia Monfort) and the other is Lui (Phillipe Noiret), with the latter individual bringing Elle over to the small seaside town of La Pointe Courte for an extended trip. It's a location Lui is all too familiar with, but something unexpected is about to crop up here. Elle is adamant that their relationship is at its endpoint, it's time for them to move on. Lui finds this notion absurd, their marriage seems just fine from his perspective. From here, they walk around the town and engage in an extended discussion revolving around the state of their relationship and their individual feelings towards one another that comprises the majority of the film, though this tete-a-tete between Elle and Lui is not the only storyline to be found in La Pointe Courte.

Two other storylines crop up during the running time, the first being the tale of two young lovers whose relationship is challenged by the girl's father while the other is a grim story about a young boy dying after an extended bout with a harrowing sickness. These are all fairly engaging plotlines to follow in terms of surface-level qualities, but it was only when sitting down to write this review that I realized what exactly all the storylines put together accomplish; Agnes Varda is examining through keys points of your average lifespan. Young idealistic love, middle-age where the realities of life have consumed you and finally death itself.

La Pointe Courte is able to explore three different points of life itself and the various emotions that inform these various segments of our lives without ever losing its intimate scale. That's a tremendous accomplishment and one that Varda executes in a restrained manner that doesn't distract from the primary focus of the film, most notably the atmosphere of the project and visual cues used to reinforce that atmosphere. Now, there's certainly dialogue to be found in La Pointe Courte, plenty of it in fact since so much of the runtime is dedicated to Elle and Lui's conversation about the current state of their love life, but Varda also clearly recognizes the power a single image, without the aid of any dialogue, can convey.

Thus, some of La Pointe Carte's most powerful moments stem from stark imagery that conveys inner turmoil beautifully. A mother in a state of overwhelming but veiled grief over her son dying, for instance, is captured in a particularly gut-wrenching shot while there are various memorable images during Elle and Lui's extensive back-and-forth dialogue (namely a visual motif that uses forced perspective to make it seem like their faces are connected) that speak more powerfully than words ever could. These specific examples and so many other pieces of imagery in La Pointe Courte aren't just the kind of images you remember after the film is over, what we frequently get here are visuals that linger with you long after the story has concluded.

Merging this kind of richly thoughtful imagery with well-crafted dialogue is a combination that tends to work on me like catnip on a feline and since that mixture is abundant in spades here in La Pointe Courte, it should be no surprise that I just found Agnes Varda's inaugural directorial effort to be a fantastic motion picture. Taking a more subtle approach to the process of a romantic partnership coming to terms with the more complicated place their relationship now stands at proves to be an engrossing concept for Varda to center her first ever film around, to the point that it's no surprise to learn that La Pointe Courte had a mighty big influence on the French New Wave films that would arrive in the years after its release. How could a film as good as La Pointe Courte not also be influential on art that came after it?