When we’re first introduced to world of La Pointe Courte, it’s through clothes on a clothesline. On an empty street, white clothes are the only thing that can be seen hanging in the streets, filling in for the inhabitants inside. The hanging clothes are in and of themselve an introduction to the world we’re about to enter, where small domesticities contextualize a larger portrait of human relationships amidst forces outside of their control.

There’s a couple credited as Him and Her, placeholders for people who might have existed or not. The woman arrives five days late to meet with her husband, who grew up in the fishing village of La Pointe Courte. Compared to the woman’s flashy cosmopolitan outfit, La Pointe Courte is a let-down. Soon, she tells her husband she wants to separate.

Often referred to as the “grandmother of the French New Wave,” Agnés Varda’s gift for making the ordinary beautiful is something to acknowledge. She makes clotheslines seem like they were predestined to be there, a sign that although this village is idyllic, it is exactly where you should be at this present moment. You can see Varda’s past job as a photographer slip into every frame, whether it’s gliding unobtrusively past a clothesline into a house, or getting sidetracked by an interloper stopping by the town to do a routine health inspection. Agnés might be the one with the script, but she lets her subjects do the talking, and they have a lot to say.

The contrast between the ugliness and beauty of mundanity is one of my favorite parts of this film. Agnés uses the town not just as a setting for a story, but also as a place that she seems to occupy as a local. She lets the camera linger on the cats as they gallivant throughout the town, then lingers on a brutal shot of a dead animal in the street. Nothing is beneath the camera’s vision. In a way, the camera itself is its own perspective, which would later become a hallmark of the French New Wave. Although a lot of famous films in the 1950s used the camera as an indifferent observer, filmmakers like Varda saw the camera as a character unto itself, observing things with a renewed subjectivity. Watching La Pointe Courte feels like you’re watching The Gleaners and I and Through A Glass Darkly at the same time.

True to the epitome of the French New Wave, Varda lays every disillusionment with modern relationships out in the open for all to see. In La Pointe Courte, it’s a cycle. While one youthful relationship is blooming in the background to the consternation of the parents, one married couple is struggling to keep their relationship alive. Him and Her find themselves at different places. He wants her to appreciate the quiet life they are about to lead in the fishing town, but she realizes she’s no longer in love with him as she once was. She no longer feels the passion that brought them together. Rather, it’s the bond that ties them both. But what kind of relationship is that?

Weirdly enough, the relationship drama wasn’t all that fascinating to me. It doesn’t have to be that explosive for the emotions to still hit in all the right places, but sometimes I wished that the dialogue wasn’t so loaded with poetry in it. I feel like that’s one of the sins that Varda would rectify more in her later films. If a film is already visually poetic, it feels redundant to have characters wax poetic about their dying marriage. We get it-you’re having a crisis of marriage, can we please get back to the daily life of the villagers?

Although looking back on it, it does seem like Him and Her are almost two sides of the director’s contrasting visions. She wants to portray a more complex version of womanhood, but she also wants to portray domesticity, which is portrayed as the woman’s realm, as something that is intrinsic in all of us. If anything, Varda wants us to see the woman as a person first and then as a woman, and then she wants us to reimagine a space that is supposed to be primarily for women as something that we all take value in. We might first see the clotheslines, but it’s only when you look inside the houses that you see the fuller picture.

La Pointe Courte is a film that foreshadows the legendary trajectory that the French New Wave will take cinema. It’s not just a film movement predicated on the perspectives of young people during one of the most tumultuous periods in human history. It’s also a look at how halfway through the 20th century, no one is seeing things through a clinical lens anymore. Cinema isn’t just for the high-brow audiences, but for those who want someone to look at the small cats in the street and the fish in the harbor and marvel at the beauty of the world around them. It’s about people who want to give into their base desires without acknowledging further complexities in their lives.

La Pointe Courte isn’t just about a love story. It’s a story about love.

FURTHER THOUGHTS

• Jerry fencing sounds like so much fun. I almost forgot how badly I would lose.
• Him looks like Franz Rogowski with a worse haircut.
• Her looks like Kim Novak without the Hitchcock voyeurism.