La Pointe Courte (1955)
The emotional clarity and wisdom of La Pointe Courte is breathtaking. Even more so when you realize it’s not a late-career rallying cry, condemning a life lived with regret, and a marriage with no way out: rather the debut feature of one Agnès Varda, already a trailblazer at the age of 27. Confronting the sleepy fishing village of Sète in the South of France, where Varda grew up, the film balances its stark manifesto on monogamous, long-term romantic love with a looser, documentary-inflected portrait of the inhabitants of the town that orbit without necessarily caring, or realizing) this one couple. Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort play the struggling pair (credited as Him and Her), and Varda films them like Ingmar Bergman, haunting in her proximity, both literal and emotional. A key text in the French New Wave, French cinema more broadly, and any study on human connection you could find.
