Drawing inspiration from William Faulkner's novel The Wild Palms, [Varda built La Pointe Courte] around the juxtaposition of two disparate themes. The first of these concerns the efforts of two young people … to revive their four-year-old marriage which is on the point of breaking up…. [In La Pointe Courte the] characters remain deliberately abstract, nameless and unpersonalised, and their conversation has a distinctly literary ring. One of the few weaknesses of La Pointe Courte is that the excessive theatricality of these two leading performances causes an unnecessary clash with the soberly handled background theme, which is concerned with the lives of the fishermen of La Pointe Courte, the village to which the couple has come. Varda shows a warm sympathy for the struggle which these people wage against poverty and the officialdom that keeps them from their traditional, but now polluted, fishing grounds; yet social problems have only...