La Pointe Courte

Director: Agnès Varda

1955 / 80min / DCP

By many reckonings a New Wave film before the term New Wave had been invented, Varda’s daring debut, made after her years as official photographer for the Théâtre nationale populaire in Paris, was shot in the Mediterranean port city of Sète, where the director spent part of her youth. Its two narratives strands—one a neorealism-inspired story of the hardscrabble lives of local fishermen; the other following recriminations and reconciliations of a married couple (Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort)—travel parallel lines while never quite overlapping, a still-singular structural conceit borrowed from William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms.

Part of Summer at Sea