A brave and original low-budget feature, Agnes Varda's first film

Agnes Varda's first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), is an early - maybe the first - example of New Wave cinema as well as a French version of the social-realism films characteristic of Italian cinema in the 50s (though I saw an interview w/ Varda in which she said she'd never seen any of the social-realism films). It's a double-genre film whose thin plot involves an attractive young couple early in their marriage; the man, for reasons we never learn, is visiting his home town, a fishing port on the Mediterranean, and his wife comes down by train from Paris to join him. The 2 of them spend long stretches of the film walking around the town and its environs discussing their on-again, off-again relationship. Should they break up, or remain together and return to Paris. "Spoiler": They return to Paris. As they wander about the town, we see lots of footage of the men and women of LPC (actually, the town is Sete) at work and play. There is much discussion of government inspectors on hand to ensure that the fishing waters are safe and that the fishermen don't take fish from outside the designated fishing areas. We never learn much about the source or outcome of these conflicts, but there are some terrific scenes in and around the boatyards as well as in among the village families with their joys and squabbles (one tiny thread of plot involves a teenage daughter who is dating against the will of her parents). Like the Italian neo-realist films, these element of LPC seem like documentary footage, and in fact AV did use the people of the village, all nonprofessional actors obviously, in all but the 2 lead role. There are some weird and innovative effects with sound - a strange musical score played I think by clarinets, and - as I learned from a Varda interview - unsual post-synch in which she kept all of the volume of the ongoing discussion between the married pair at the same volume level, so for example as they walk away from the camera down a long jetty we continue to hear their discussion at the same volume level: As they get farther away, we seem to follow them vocally but not visually. It's not a great film by any measure, but a brave and original low-budget feature that anticipated the films of Truffault (though without the humor), Godard (though w/out the politics), and Resnais (though without the self-consciousness).