So the second disc of this Agnès Varda box set is entitled “Early Varda,” and its centerpiece is her first film from 1954, La Pointe Courte. She made it on a shoestring budget, using non-professional actors for most of the parts, and while it showed at Cannes to praise, it didn’t get a theatrical release out of that praise. (In a 1966 NYT interview, Varda noted: “The picture cost us $18,000, and today, 12 year later, our debts are still not paid off.”)

Which makes an interesting point about canon formation, because it’s now widely claimed that this was the first film of the French New Wave… but an entire generation, maybe two, grew up with this movie as an obscurity that they might have barely heard of. And if you go through film school and you’ve never seen this, and you watch the most beloved arthouse movies and you’ve never seen this, well, that builds on itself: A movie that falls outside of the canon isn’t easily going to get the awareness to make it in.

Even today, this isn’t a movie you hear a lot about. Varda’s definitely had her spot in film history reclaimed, but it’s Cléo from 5 to 7 that mostly cements her New Wave credentials. So I went into this expecting it to be… y’know, a first movie, the thing you make on a shoestring budget when you’re first learning your craft, which will show glimmers of your mature talent, but will be tbh not all that good.

But holy fuck, this is great. Before making movies, Varda was a photographer, so it’s not surprising that all the shots are beautifully composed — hit pause at basically any random minute, and odds are that you have an image you could frame and hang on your wall — but from the very first scene, she makes it clear that she also understands moving pictures as well, with a shot where her camera moves into the town through lines of hanging clothes, then follows a man from outside his house as he walks from room to room.

So La Pointe Courte is not just the name of the movie, it’s also the name of the small town where the movie is set. One of the two throughlines of the film is a kind of portrait of the place and the people living there, starring some of those very people. It’s not a documentary — it’s scripted, it’s fiction, they’re delivering lines — but it’s grounded in a quotidian realism. There’s a whole big conflict between the local fishermen and the health inspectors that are trying to block them from fishing unsafe shellfish out of this bacteria-laden lagoon; there’s a bit about a teenage girl and her wannabe-suitor and her parents’ reaction to that; there’s a mother whose kid gets sick; there’s a bunch of feral cats that annoy people. All of this is acted and scripted (Varda also wrote the screenplay) in a naturalistic way.

Decidedly not naturalistic is the other thread of the movie: A couple from Paris, played by professional actors in contrast to the rest of the cast, is coming here on vacation, where the husband grew up as a child. Their marriage is having trouble — she doesn’t join him for five days, and when she arrives, her first announcement is that she wants a separation — and they’re going to have long philosophical discourses about the nature of love and marriage and youth and age. And Varda very deliberately did these in this cold, hyper-formal style. The two of them declaim their lines in an emotionless way; the shots of them are often of them standing stock still, usually posed in interesting ways (e.g., one of them in profile, with their face partially obscuring the other’s facing forward). If you didn’t pay attention to dates, you’d say that this was homage to Bergman’s Persona, but of course it anticipates that film by over a decade.

The contrast of this cold, sterile couple with the vibrant reality of the other actors is never resolved in the movie — Varda isn’t driving to any cheesy happy ending where they realize they need to Doc Hollywood themselves or anything. It’s just there, with the down to earth concerns of the townsfolk kind of inherently taking the piss out of this hyper-cerebral philosophical subplot. “They talk too much to be happy” one of the women says dismissively, in a line that cracked me up.

This isn’t just a good first movie, or an interesting historical curiosity, it’s a great movie, full stop. That it didn’t get proper distribution in its day, that Varda waited seven years to get funding for her next feature film (and even that only because Jacques Demy, not yet her husband, recommended her to a financier looking for a talented director to back), and that it doesn’t have a more deservedly prominent place in film history is a goddamn travesty. Highly recommended.