On the Sixtieth Anniversary of Agnès Varda’s “Le bonheur”

A still from Le bonheur (1965).

In the summer in New York City, every bodega you pass sells flowers, and every bodega selling flowers sells sunflowers, which do look a lot like the sun as a child might draw the sun: with distinct triangular rays and a smiling brown face in the center.

Sixty years ago, Agnès Varda opened her film Le bonheur with an image of a sunflower, a florist’s symbol of loyalty. Did Varda know the Greek myth? The Oceanid Clytie falls for Helios, the . . .