Remembering Varda: La Pointe Courte

By Arijit Paul

The grand old matriarch of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda's debut feature La Pointe Courte has a distinctive quality from the French films of that era. She moves apart from the more grandiose, traditional style to a simple, grounded one where she captured the everyday little things in life with a poetic vision. It isn't everyday that you watch a film which infuses documentary ethics with a fictional narrative so well to achieve an utmost level of simplicity. 

The story is seen from two different sides - one explores a married couple's complicated relationship, where they ponder upon their journey that they have travelled till now. The other is a story about a common fisherman family who are economically poor but are extremely sensitive about their prestige. The story unfolds on the small fishing town of La Pointe Courte which had first attracted Varda from her early photographer days. It is intriguing to note that although she had no prior experience with filmmaking, the framing and composition of La Pointe Courte absolutely didn't give that vibe. In fact, while exploring both sides (feminine and masculine) of the personality elements she projected the characters' face perpendicular to each other. In contrast, she also captured the day to day activities of the fisherman with patiently crafted long, static shots injecting some casual symbolic visuals in between. Her close friend, Resnais obviously kept pace with the narrative and edited the sequences in that manner. She made this five years before Jean-Luc Godard and Truffaut jumped into world cinema with their timeless debuts, but technically this film announces the onset of the French New Wave. 

This is one fantastically woven tale that tells a story of the most common people in a society in the simplest of manners. Trivia: While editing the film in Varda's apartment, Resnais kept annoying her by comparing the film to works by Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni and others that she was unfamiliar with until she got so fed up with it all that she went to the Cinémathèque to find out what he was talking about.