Hear Me Out: Agnès Varda’s ‘Le Bonheur’ is actually a horror movie

Posted On February 16, 2025February 16, 2025

Agnès Varda was a rare female voice in the French New Wave, with her 1962 film Cleo from 5 to 7 asserting her place in the feminist filmmaking canon with its exploration of gender roles, beauty, and patriarchy. Yet her next feature film, Le Bonheur, took a much darker turn, dissecting notions of happiness and male entitlement under the guise of vividly coloured cinematography and satirical artifice. In many ways, you can call it a horror movie.

On the surface, Le Bonheur appears like a charming and romantic film; you only have to Google it to find images of a picture-perfect family, gorgeous yellow sunflowers, or a couple lazing in the grass. When the movie begins, Varda lulls us into a false sense of security with an idyllic opening sequence featuring a couple, François and Thérèse, and their son and daughter. They perfectly subscribe to the ideal heteropatriarchal expectation of the nuclear family, and Varda frames this as a natural and beautiful thing by allowing the characters to immerse themselves in nature, with flowers and fields painted in saturated colours.

Varda was a smart filmmaker, though, and one who was always conscious of challenging the status quo. Everything here is too perfect and cookie-cutter, reflecting the shallow and unfulfilling nature of a life based on outward appearances. These dreamy sequences of marital and parental bliss are satirical, a shiny exterior hiding deceit. Just like how David Lynch would become well-known for his use of contrasting imagery to uncover the murky truth hiding beneath suburbia, like the white picket fences and red roses opposing a severed ear in Blue Velvet, Varda does a similar thing here, using bright hues and images that look like something from a fairytale to communicate the dissatisfaction that can be found behind the curtain of many nuclear families.

We quickly realise that Varda is not telling a predictable tale when François begins seeing a woman he meets at the post office, Émilie, who happens to look rather similar to Thérèse. The audacious nature of François’ affair is quite blinding; not only does he think it’s perfectly OK to cheat on his wife because it makes him happy, but he picks someone who has enough resemblance to suggest to Thérèse: ‘I want someone like you, just better.’

François’ only justification is his own happiness; for him, his own sense of fulfilment and enjoyment in life is of the utmost importance, and Varda seems to use him as a personification of the patriarchy, putting the wants and needs of the women in his life at the bottom of the ladder. Meanwhile, he stands at the top – without a shred of fear that he might fall.

To François, women become objects to serve different purposes in his life, subsequently keeping him afloat. He doesn’t worry about how his actions will affect anyone but himself, thus using Thérèse as a reliable and homely figure to give him children and fulfil some kind of pastoral, idyllic fantasy of family, a role he has been conditioned to strive towards. Meanwhile, he sees Émilie as the sexual object he can use to escape from family life – the more erotic version of his wife, who he can use when and as he pleases. If we’re getting psychoanalytical, François can definitely be studied through the lens of the Madonna–whore complex, struggling to see Thérése as satisfying enough on her own.

Varda’s use of aesthetic and visual cues is as brilliant as ever in Le Bonheur. When François and Èmilie kiss in one scene, you can see images of male and female sex symbols on the wall behind them, like Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Varda appears to be commenting on how these faces are considered symbols, signifiers of lust and sex, which completely foregoes the depth to be found in these individuals. Similarly, François harnesses a similar sense of vapidness, failing to see the women in his life as multi-dimensional people. Perhaps he’d add a photo of Èmilie to that wall, but probably not one of Thérèse.

Additionally, the sunflowers – a symbol of spring, strength, and loyalty – take on a cruel irony when a plot twist arrives and fully shatters any trace of hope left. After François tells his wife about Émilie, Thérèse pretends as though everything is fine and makes love to him before the pair fall asleep. When François wakes, he discovers that her body has been found in the lake. This is when the movie truly becomes a horror story. Varda communicates the terrors of being misused and mishandled as a woman and how the lack of compassion and equality offered by the patriarchy can result in catastrophe.

The worst part of all is that François shortly replaces his now-deceased wife with Èmilie, who assumes the matriarchal role in the family, mirroring the start of the film. Now, however, the colours aren’t as bright, with Varda hinting at the cyclical nature of male behaviour. Like the four seasons, the weather will change, and hope will come, but darkness and cold will also have their turn. How long will it be until François feels the same feelings for Émilie as he did for Thérèse and goes after the next single woman he comes across who can satisfy his desire for desire itself?

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