Growing Young Gracelessly

...Le Bonheur is the story of a young carpenter from the Paris suburbs who works for his uncle and lives comfortably and happily with his lovable blonde seamstress wife and two adorable children...

...The result is again a joke, but an unintentional one, rancid and embarrassing...

...Again, when Francois, with the two children, is looking for Thérèse in the woods, and stopping periodically to ask people whether they have seen her, the pacing of the action through both subject and camera movement, dialogue, and editing is anguishingly and expertly accelerated toward the dreadful discovery...

...But Renoir is not the only model: In certain blurry effects one recognizes a hint from Monet, some of the indoor compositions evoke the Post-Impressionists, and there are two or three flower vases straight out of Redon...

...The mistress is radiant in the transports of surreptitious passion snatched usually during lunch hour...

...Then I feel as if I sprouted some additional arms You don't find that I love you less...

...Though this, too, becomes partly an indictment of middle-aged callowness, the neo-realist, social-documentary approach to life in the streets makes itself tangily manifest here...

...Having made the rounds of a dismal maternity ward in the retinue of an eminent but heartless gynecologist (the older generation again!-and what a waste of Georges Wilson's talent), the girl acquiesces...

...And this lovely combination of breast-beating and propaganda is packaged in what the old boys think is the freewheeling style of the New Wave, replete with its best tricks, and then some...

...not only because the same bit of music (don't ask me which, I'm not a Mozart man) becomes boring after a while, but also because its courtliness and control consort ill with the unrestrained and demotic goings-on...

...Hold on to your stomachs, here we go...

...De Sica and Zavattini made some remarkable neo-realist dramas like Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D., they managed to make the jump to the next fashion, low-life comedy with sentimental or social overtones, such as Gold of Naples and Marriage Italian Style-the distance, after all, was not so great...

...No less irritating is the Mozart score...

...Varda's husband's movie, The umbrellas of Cherbourg, was one of the silliest films ever made, so Le Bonheur strikes me as one of the most amoral and one of the silliest...

...True enough, the outdoor photography is that blend of lushness and winsomeness characteristic of Renoir's paintings, but, let us face it, Renoir was a sentimental, second-rate painter, and to imitate him is no better than, in music, to imitate Tchaikovsky...

...Ambiguous ending, as in any number of new-wave films...

...A clue to the artistic and intellectual integrity of this film, which Agnes Varda wrote as well as directed, is provided by that fruity image...

...But our hero (a stock part to which Nino Castelnuovo does uninteresting justice) tells the middle-aged slob off: He is merely green with jealousy of youth's vitality and hope...

...Then it must be a French film...

...and the wife has the double bliss of matrimony and ignorance...

...lingering of the camera over a variety of still photographs on someone's wall to set a scene in what is taken to be a very filmic way...

...For a while he veers toward marriage, then he avoids the pining girl...

...We are allowed to wallow in these faces on the boy's wall, and I must confess that I saw about as much of World War III in them as of the Second Punic War, but I could understand why the magazines weren't buying them...

...And it's so stupid to deprive oneself of life, of love...

...For reality, we get a Paris suburb in which nobody gossips, parents who don't blame their son-in-law for their daughter's suicide, children who don't miss their mother in the least, a husband and mistress completely free from guilt over the wife's death, etc...

...They live in decadent old-world elegance, but their essential nastiness is epitomized by what hangs on their walls: ghastly paintings of Napoleon and his campaigns by Meissonier...

...If it is natural law for Francois to have an affair, why is it not so for Thérèse...

...The lesson to be derived from all this is a melancholy one: In film, styles change very fast and a creator is likely to be out of date well before he is ready to retire...

...It is undignified, and it is bad art...

...Whereupon our pomiferous octopus proceeds to make mad love to his stunned but obliging and loving wife...

...But what came after is simply beyond them...

...This grotesque may well have inspired Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur...

...Actually, recent French films tend to omit only the front part of the horse...

...Then I see an apple tree outside the fence, and it's in bloom too...

...She gives him all the money he needs for an abortion, yet cautions him against such an act...

...While he sleeps the sleep of the just, or of the just fagged out, she drowns herself in a near-by pond...

...Alas, coming from these old-timers, the dernier cri emerges as the last gasp...

...And, of course, there are the other new-wave paraphernalia: a tribute to another film-maker, in this case Marcel Carné and his Hôtel du Nord...

...But after a month, during one of those family outings that act as a refrain in the film, the husband is persuaded to share his secret happiness with his wife...

...otherwise, they are either so static, or so artfully contrived in composition and choreography, as to deny us any illusion of spontaneity or intensity...

...Ah, those simple people...

...And now what of happiness being submission to the laws of nature...

...There are more apple blossoms, more apples to add to ours do you see...

...As she confesses that she did not get the abortion the filmwithin-the-film ends...

...Before you can say Jacques Robinson, they have an affair...

...You, me, the children, we're like an apple orchard inside a fence...

...But Le Bonheur does nothing to illuminate this or any other proposition...

...A young Italian photographer, the rebellious son of a rich lawyer, is trying to make it on his own in Paris...

...Does Varda, as director, contribute anything...

...A Young World tries to say that though the previous generation, that of today's parents, is indeed much to blame-even if they were heroic in the War, they became jejune in the peace-some pity and appreciation might yet be spared for them...

...establishment of a character through a book he reads, in this case a volume of Aimé Césaire on a Negro medical student's shelf...

...He quits, in order to photograph, not girlies, but faces in the street, in which he perceives the history of mankind, including the next world war...

...But a typical dragged-in homage runs thus: Emilie and a woman at the post office are looking at some recent stamp issues, one of them with King John the Good on it...

...He, next, falls afoul of the cynical and lecherous photographer he works for (a small, dull part on which Pierre Brasseur's prodigious talents are prodigally wasted...

...Jean le Bon," one of the women wonders, "d'you think he was the husband of Anna la Bonne...

...There is no denying it, Le Bonheur has style, most of it Godard's, every one of whose devices is present...

...Everything in the film is smooth, casual, soft, pretty...

...Now comes a tug-of-war between the girl and the boy who is afraid of marriage and bourgeois mediocrity like that of his parents: "They promised us big things, then they did nothing They want us to be like them...

...On the way to the operating room, the girl passes a glass book case containing a complete set of the Pléiade-all the French classics in suspiciously mint condition...

...They look miserably at each other...

...Meanwhile our hero is yearning for his lost Cinderella, and he seeks her all over the Medical School until he finds her in a large lecture hall...

...Well, there is Francois' first visit to Emilie who has just moved into a new apartment...

...If, however, he is the apple grower, the image implies the most brazen kind of double standard, whereby the women become subordinate-indeed objects-and our fellow can go gathering apple buds to his heart's content, while they are condemned to be sedentary, passive, and complaisant...

...The proposition as such is dubious: We have come a long way since Rousseau and Sturm und Drang toward recognizing that, in human behavior, we don't know the first thing about natural laws, if, indeed, they exist at all...

...One day he meets a postal clerk who is as blonde and lovable as his wife, and even prettier...

...After a couple of months of mourning and summer vacationing, he marries his little post-mistress...

...They are both eager to embrace, but careful not even to brush against each other...

...Varda's own program notes...

...Et puis ca me fait tellement de plaisir...

...Moreover, they have not so wholly transcended the so-called conventional values as they might think...

...If there is anything more dispiriting than the New Wave trying to be quintessentially and encyclopedically new-wave, it is the sight of the Old Wave having a desperate and disastrous go at it...

...No voice is ever raised, no one does anything ungainly, no setting is less than delectable, nothing jars...

...By way of winning over his mildly jolted wife to a ménage à trois, he bolsters up his horticutural trope with a tentacular one: "It's as if I had ten arms with which to enfold you, and you too had ten arms for me...

...The young, on the other hand, are shown as spontaneous, pure, funloving yet aspiring to a better world, but are asked to remember that they don't hold all the answers, either...

...And is it natural law to stay together as a family...

...And so they are, the evil old things...

...Perhaps the only wholly successful scene in A Young World is an auto accident with the victim lying in the street and various bystanders reacting in diverse ways...

...For fantasy, we have such snatches of dialogue as Emilie, the mistress, telling the hero, Francois, when he asks whether she understands him, "Oui, je comprends le francais et le Francois...

...They go to a movie...

...But what of the much vaunted visual beauty, the style of the film...

...The boy turns gigolo for a night to a middle-aged woman (the gifted Madeleine Robinson in a puny role): How corrupt can the rich elders get...

...the husband is ecstatic, what with the illicit joy spilling over into the licit...

...But she also gives him a good address: "Two sisters-they are even very cultivated...

...Unfortunately, the girl (passably played by Christine Delaroche) managed to get pregnant, in best old-wave style, on that very first occasion-perhaps the fact that she is only a first-year medical student might be considered a mitigating circumstance...

...From these conflicting impulses there results a veritable ballet of near-collisions, evasions, sudden spurts and suppressions of movement-quite as if the clinamen of Lucretius were being dramatized -which, against the background of the unsettled-in quarters, achieves a wonderful, nervous expectancy...

...This last, at least, makes some sense: On the TV screen, a character utters the line that has been taken as the theme of Le Bonheur, "Happiness is perhaps submission to the laws of nature.' (I shall return to this...

...only what Allais treated succinctly and sardonically, with perhaps a grain of pathos, is here lingered over, idyllicized, and rhapsodized about...

...And though Marie France Boyer as Emilie has a good face, and Claire Drouot as Thérèse good-sized breasts, there is nothing much else about them to justify all the poring over their anatomies...

...Some people have found the sex scenes exciting...

...They should not, however, try to copy, apologize, and plead...

...Equally inept are the typically new-wave interpolated tributes to fellow-artists: Emilie reads Jacques Prévert's La Pluie et le beau temps, someone referred to is named after a Truffaut character, Thérèse takes Francois to see Viva Maria, a television set is playing Renoir's Picnic on the Grass...

...The reviewers have raved about the Renoir-like quality of the images, an erudite insight they gleaned from Mme...

...Anna la bonne is a dreary verse monologue that Cocteau wrote for the chanteuse Marianne Oswald, and there is nothing in it with the slightest bearing on Le Bonheur...

...The boy, after all, does it for unselfish purposes, for his girl and for his principles...

...Everyone is uncomplicated, guiltless, and happy...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Growing Young Gracelessly That turn-of-the-century comic genius, Alphonse Allais, wrote a short sketch called "Des Gens simples," in which a husband, wife, and lover do the most extraordinary and outrageous things to the accompaniment of polite, unassuming little platitudes, and without batting one eyelash among the three of them -because they are "simple people...

...the rest of it Resnais', Truffaut's, and Antonioni's...

...The word "FIN" appears on the western's screen and extends to our eastern screen...

...After some rather old-fashioned (and belated) hesitancies and pursuit, they become lovers...

...After all, she is a baker's daughter from Clermont-Ferrand, where Pascal was born and the First Crusade was preached...

...using a hand-held camera wherever remotely possible, etc...

...the woman only for sex...

...When the images in Sundays and Cybèle suggested Corot, and in black and white at that, the effect was much more satisfying, largely because Corot is worthier of emulation...

...Many of these images redound to the glory of the cinématographes, Jean Rabier and Claude Beausoleil, but they look top-heavy and self-conscious in a film where nothing else competes with them for our attention...

...She can't go through with it...

...He doesn't like women's behinds,' says the boss from his bed shared with a concubine, "c'est un intellectuel...

...Cesare Zavattini, make an abjectly humble genuflection before the younger generation while also trying to assimilate recent film techniques...

...In A Young World, Vittorio de Sica and his scenarist...

...It is as if a Playboy joke were rewritten as an erotico-sentimental novel...

...But then Varda has to spoil it all by cross-cutting from Francois holding the dead Thérèse to one-frame flashbacks (a la Resnais) of her drowning-sheer gimmickry...

...they want our complicity...

...here, there is neither enough reality nor enough fantasy, and the film is ultimately neither fish nor fowl, merely fishy and foul...

...One might think of it as a fairy tale, except that the fairy-tale world has its own distinct morality, as well as poetic symbolism...

...As one of the abortionist hags angrily slams down her Remembrance of Things Past (culture, you see, is not worth much), our heroine runs out past the Empire furniture, and we cut from Meissonier to the lively pop art on the pinball machine with which the hero is playing while waiting for his girl...

...If the wife, children, and mistress are all apple trees, one presumes that our hero is an apple tree also, and trees do not go about picking, or picking up, trees across the fence...

...About the only interesting thing in them is that it usually takes a while before one can tell whether Francois is in bed with wife or mistress (get the point...

...a big, noisy western...

...Why not have bastards all over the place...

...At an orgiastic medical students' ball, he meets an appealing young student and, without a word spoken, makes love to her on a secluded balcony...

...Finally he returns and recommends abortion...

...But the people in Le Bonheur are a trifle too elaborate to be animals, and quite a bit too simple to be human beings...

...With a grand, heuristic image, he explains: "C'est simple, tu sais...

...And why stop at one extramarital relationship per person...

...We end with the new family going for an outing in the same woods in which the old family gamboled at the start of the film...

...or Francois' response when Thérèse, his wife, announces that they are going to a movie with no horses in it, "No horses...

...Just as Mme...

...There is no demur from within, no murmur from without-the new wife has better taste in books and clothes, anyway...