Happiness

Le Bonheur (Happiness, 1965) is Agnès Varda's drama of love and infidelity, and you can watch it online on iFILM. François, a young carpenter, is happy with his wife and kids — and starts an affair anyway.

He loves his wife Thérèse, loves his small son and daughter, loves lazy picnics in the grass. Then he meets a young woman at the post office, and he loves her too, seeing no contradiction in any of it. The film neither scolds him nor pities him. It just lays out a sunlit idyll in saturated color, set to Mozart, until that calm reveals a quiet cruelty buried inside the very idea of being happy.

Varda — the only woman among the masters of the French New Wave — made a film that still argues with itself: whose happiness are we watching, and who pays for it? The central family is played by a real one, the Drouots, which makes the soft ruthlessness hit harder. It's for viewers who like a beautiful surface hiding an uneasy question. Stream Le Bonheur online on iFILM.