It's a love story, of a sort, but not what we usually see. Instead, it's a story about love. Instead of boy meets girl or vice versa, here we have a happily married individual, parent to two small children and husband to an adoring wife, who happens to fall in love again. What is to be done?
The first thing you notice are the colours - they're stunning, omnipresent and mysterious. Are they there to remind us that this isn't a black and white world, with simple answers, or are they there to beguile us, and lead us astray? Perhaps they're not there for us at all; they just are, like nature.
The next thing you notice is how often flowers come into the frame - right from the start, first as part of a fecund but cyclical natural world and then as bouquets, to make us think about what happens when we don't leave well enough alone. The wild flower, beautiful in its own environment, thrives; the cut flower, beautiful in our homes, dies. But we do want to have our cake and eat it, too.
This film was made in 1964, and it divided public opinion when it came out, because it challenged notions of fidelity and marriage that had endured, at least in their public proclamation, unchanged for centuries. It did so by presenting the act of taking a lover while married as an arguably logical step, based on the concept that happiness can be increased for one without being decreased for another. Whether that concept applies to love, however, is another matter entirely.
The film is beautiful, lyrical and troubling. The actors perform admirably, none so more than the non-professional Claire Drouot, Jean Claude Drouot's real-life wife playing his on-screen wife. (The children are their own children, too.) The script is deceptively simple, the scenes are largely quiet, and yet all the while there are important and substantial ideas being raised. Is love a feeling or a relationship? What do we owe ourselves and what do we owe our loved ones? Varda does not give you the answers, but the way she gives you the questions is marvellous.
The first thing you notice are the colours - they're stunning, omnipresent and mysterious. Are they there to remind us that this isn't a black and white world, with simple answers, or are they there to beguile us, and lead us astray? Perhaps they're not there for us at all; they just are, like nature.
The next thing you notice is how often flowers come into the frame - right from the start, first as part of a fecund but cyclical natural world and then as bouquets, to make us think about what happens when we don't leave well enough alone. The wild flower, beautiful in its own environment, thrives; the cut flower, beautiful in our homes, dies. But we do want to have our cake and eat it, too.
This film was made in 1964, and it divided public opinion when it came out, because it challenged notions of fidelity and marriage that had endured, at least in their public proclamation, unchanged for centuries. It did so by presenting the act of taking a lover while married as an arguably logical step, based on the concept that happiness can be increased for one without being decreased for another. Whether that concept applies to love, however, is another matter entirely.
The film is beautiful, lyrical and troubling. The actors perform admirably, none so more than the non-professional Claire Drouot, Jean Claude Drouot's real-life wife playing his on-screen wife. (The children are their own children, too.) The script is deceptively simple, the scenes are largely quiet, and yet all the while there are important and substantial ideas being raised. Is love a feeling or a relationship? What do we owe ourselves and what do we owe our loved ones? Varda does not give you the answers, but the way she gives you the questions is marvellous.