Le Bonheur

The sheer visual elegance and romantic splendour of Varda's film aroused the kind of critical suspicions that quite rightly surround Un Homme et une Femme. But although the sexual politics of its plot (about a man trying to love two women) may seem stilted, the film retains two huge advantages. In the first place, Varda is trying to explore on film the kind of romantic areas that have so often (and so wrongly) been the exclusive province of male directors. And in the second, the overwhelming beauty of the movie's surface is not so much used to glamorise its characters as to illuminate their own dream worlds.