Episode #57 -- Le Bonheur

or: "When Are Screenwriters Going to Flip the Script With This Naming Convention? Why Couldn't Misery Be a Feel-Good Comedy?"

This week we're watching Le Bonheur, one of Agnes Varda's contributions to the French New Wave cinema movement, and let us tell you, it is a delightful time. Le Bonheur means "happiness" in French, and just stop for a second and think about all of the movies that have had the word “happiness” in their title. Todd Solondz's Happiness. Takashi Miike's The Happiness of the Katikuris. Sensing a trend? You know the old saying, the first time you notice something it's a coincidence, the second occurrence that you notice is irrefutable proof of a trend that you really shouldn't even bother looking further into by searching for other movies with the word happiness in the title on IMDB. We’re all familiar with that old chestnut, right? Right?

Le Bonheur isn't as grim as either of those movies, thankfully, but the title definitely is... shall we say.. misleading. It’s about a French family who seem to live a pretty idyllic life, and then one of the members of the family does a thing that fucks that all up not very much for some of them and a whole whole WHOLE lot for others. We hope you like what happens in this week’s episode, which focuses on a similar situation with about a hundred times the intensity.

Also in this episode:

We talk about how great Patti Harrison is! She’s a trans comedian who has been in a bunch of different shows, and who has made several pretty excellent videos for Seriously.TV that are on YouTube. To wit:

So, yeah. She’s the best, pretty much, and if you disagree… we don’t know, burn in hell or whatever? Yeah, that seems about right. See ya next week!