Shared Not Torn Apart

La point-courte (1954)
directed by Agnès Varda
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

But since it is still September, and I can still see the last of summer's sun on my skin, if not exactly feel it anymore, then Agnès Varda's first feature, so full of ocean light as to recast the climate of my living room, is a fine goodbye to June, August, and July. There are two films at work in La point-courte, the first a documentary of fishing life in a Mediterranean village, the second a discussion between a husband and wife thinking of living apart. Like in Varda's other films, there is enough truth from sentence to sentence to comprise entire treatises on love, and done with all the delicacy of a breeze. The heart isn't to be trusted at the end of a relationship, she says, because the heart will never tell you when you've had enough. The heart wants more, always more, and so the mind or the body must rebel. That her heroine's mind does not is no compromise, but loveliness itself, a green sea in miniature.