La Pointe Courte

Agnès Varda's first film, and a surprising place to begin given her relation to cinema: when she made it she had seen almost no films and was working as a photographer. It sets two strands beside each other. One is in the fishing village of La Pointe Courte near Sète: poverty, health inspections, mussel beds and the death of a child. The other is a couple who have come to the village, talking about their marriage. The strands never touch; the villagers are real villagers and the couple are professional actors. Alain Resnais edited it. At the time it found no distribution and was barely seen. It was later counted as a forerunner of the French New Wave: small budget, real locations, non-professional performers and shooting outside a studio. Philippe Noiret plays the man, in his first film. An important document for anyone curious about where the New Wave came from. But it is not an easy watch: the break between the two strands is deliberate, the dialogue is literary, and the couple's conversations sound very theatrical now.