Cult 101: Happiness (1965)
Director: Agnès Varda Run Time: 80 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 1965 Language: French
Starring: Jean-Claude Drouot, Claire Drouot, Olivier Drouot, Sandrine Drouot, Marie-France Boyer
Country: France
Language: French
Cult 101 at Gateway Film Center
A celebration of the best cult films of all time.
About the film:
Though married to the good-natured, beautiful Thérèse (Claire Drouot), young husband and father François (Jean-Claude Drouot) finds himself falling unquestioningly into an affair with an attractive postal worker. One of Agnès Varda’s most provocative films, Happiness (1965), examines, with a deceptively cheery palette and the spirited strains of Mozart, the ideas of fidelity and happiness in a modern, self-centered world.
About the filmmaker:
Agnès Varda was a photographer, film director, Paris-based key figure in modern film history, and one of the world’s leading filmmakers. Agnès Varda was also a professor of film and documentaries at The European Graduate School / EGS. She was born on May 30, 1928, in Ixelles, Belgium, with the slightly different name of Arlette Varda. Her father is Greek, and her mother is of French origins. She escaped from Belgium in 1940 to live in Sète, France, with her family where she spent her teenager years.
Varda studied at the École du Louvre with a focus on art history and photography at the École des Beaux-Arts. She then went on to work at the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris as a photographer, which was directed by the famous French actor and filmmaker Jean Villar.
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