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And so the notable thing about this affair is that he’s really clear about it with her: He does love her, but he also loves his wife; he just thinks he can love both. She is reluctantly okay with it, although it’s clear that she’d rather be his one-and-only, and their affair carries on for a while.

Then later, at a picnic with his wife, she’s like “what’s up, dude, you’re way too happy lately” and he’s like “I don’t want to hurt you, so maybe I shouldn’t say anything,” which is a great way to get someone to beg you to say whatever it is you’re reluctant to say. She obliges, and he launches into a whole monologue about how he loves this other woman, but also loves her, and he isn’t going to leave her or anything, can it be cool?

And this is where the movie is at its most ambiguous, and most sensitive to what cultural script you’re bringing into it. Because like, all of the following takes are completely valid and supported by the movie, while also being in contradiction with each other:

1. He’s a selfish jerk, who is just after his own pleasure and doesn’t give a shit about these women.
2. He genuinely loves both women, and is trying to find a way that can be true without hurting anyone.
3. This is a very normal affair that he’s simply trying to justify with a bunch of flowery words.
4. He got into a poly relationship in a not-entirely-ethical way, and is trying to fix that mess.
5. The woman he’s having an affair with is a liberated woman who is making her own choices with her eyes wide open, and this is the relationship she wants.
6. The woman he’s having an affair with is stuck in a toxic relationship with this guy who’s manipulating her expertly.
7. He’s in a traditional French monogamish marriage, where men basically all have mistresses, and this is a very normal relationship pattern. (Supporting this view is a conversation earlier in the movie with several of his (male) coworkers, where he was the only one sticking up for monogamy at all while he was already having an affair.)

And so however you’d personally look at it, it’s basically impossible for me to imagine how a French arthouse audience in 1965 would have viewed it. The Criterion disc had a couple of things talking about the movie, and one thing that’s very clear is that the movie was regarded as “shocking” in 1965 when it was released, but what mindset people were in, and the valence of their shock, feels absolutely impossible for a modern to say from where we sit.

But regardless of where you come from, the one inarguable fact here is that his wife is the wrongedest of wronged parties here, and so obviously you’re wondering how she’s going to react. And her reaction is, after some initial discomfort, that she totally gets it, she’s happy with this situation, let’s make love right here in this idyllic meadow. They do, and he falls asleep, and when he wakes up she’s gone. He gathers up the kids (who are napping a discreet distance away), and goes looking for her.

A tense search scene later, and he finds… people pulling her body out of a nearby lake. And so here’s another ambiguous moment: Did she kill herself, or was she just out for a stroll to think things through and had an awfully-timed accident? The former seems obviously more likely in the circumstances, but there’s a little flash of a scene of her flailing and trying to grab a tree branch to pull herself out of the water. (But is that even a real scene, or is that how her husband is picturing it in his head to assuage his guilt? One of the extras on the disc was an interview decades later with the two female leads of the movie, and even they had differing opinions about whether she had killed herself.)

There’s then a somber bit of the movie, as they work through the aftermath of her death. One notable thing here: Nobody thinks it’s plausible that a single man can raise two children, the only question is whether his elderly parents should take them in, or his wife’s brother’s family. However you’ve been thinking about this guy, that little detail — which Varda did not include by accident — surely has to push you toward the “selfish jerk” side of things. (Although, would it have for people at the time? I have no idea, maybe it was just an obvious commonplace view.)

And then of course, there’s the question of his mistress. He had, after all, told her that he loved her and would have happily married her had he not already been married to his other love. And he tells her now that this is still true: He’s deeply sad about his wife’s death, but y’know, wanna get hitched?

So they do, and with a woman in the house, he gets his kids back. We see scenes of the same comfortable domesticity (in the same house) that he had with his first wife, including such totally non-gendered scenes as her cooking and taking care of the kids. And the final scene in the movie is them going off to have an idyllic picnic together in the countryside, just like he did with his dead wife.

With the plot laid out like I just did it, it sounds clearly like a scathing social critique. But it very notably doesn’t feel like that in any given scene; and the lead actor gets a ton of credit for making his character seem sympathetic, too. What could very easily come off as callow selfishness has a kind of naive sincerity to it, as if he’s playing a kind of holy fool.

I have to think on the whole, that Varda is going for the social critique here, and that she’s making this as something of a counterpoint to the films of her male French New Wave compatriots, whose female characters tend to be written… well, from the perspective of mid-twencen French men, with all that entails.

But what makes Varda brilliant is that she’s not going to film the straightforwardly angry polemic. She’s going to make a movie that has some real sympathy for this guy, in which he’s not a cartoon villain — but where the shiv gets slipped in all the more effectively for how much its audience has its guard down.