La Pointe-Courte (1955, Agnès Varda) (Patreon)

52/100

Of significant historical note for several reasons: It's Varda's debut feature; it's an early example of the "one or two actors amidst non-pros essentially playing themselves in a fictionalized portrait of their lives" approach that Nomadland would turn into Oscar glory decades later; and I think Varda may have invented what everyone thinks of as the Bergman Persona shot, with one face looking toward the camera while half-obscured by another face in profile. 

As is often the case with hybridized cinema (including Nomadland), I find the film as a whole somewhat unsatisfying, precisely because it's trying to combine two things that don't really complement each other terribly well. In theory, the marital conflict stems at least in part from Noiret's* attachment to La Pointe-Courte, a tiny village in the south of France, but their film-long debate while wandering around (reminiscent of Journey to Italy) focuses much more on universal issues like whether the love that endures after infatuation has ebbed is enough to live on. Their dilemma seems largely unconnected from the villagers' quotidian existence, depicted in separate scenes and extremely concerned with local fishing regulations and how they can be circumvented. Both parts have their appeal, but neither accumulates enough force to carry the movie on its own, and one of them has just kinda been imposed upon the other (whereas Rossellini obviously takes full symbolic advantage of the locations that Bergman and Sanders visit). "They talk too much to be happy," a random woman says of the couple, and that's pretty much the height of environment addressing character psychology. Still a promising debut, but I tend to prefer Varda's documentaries to her narrative features, and La Pointe-Courte was already pointing in that direction. 

* I have to use the actors' names, as the characters aren't assigned any—you could also argue that this film influenced Hiroshima, Mon Amour, given that Resnais edited it, and oh I now see that he always openly acknowledged that.