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Freedom
and Dirt by Chris Darke
Funny
how certain films come back to haunt you. I was a student in
late 1980s London when I first saw Sans toit ni loi,
and I remember liking everything about it. The terse England
title Vagabond. The poster image of Sandrine Bonnaire
with windswept witch’s hair and the horizon in her eyes. The
film’s cold glaucous light, the colors of icy skies and frozen
earth. The evocative sense of inhabiting places I wasn’t used
to seeing in films: a run-down chateau, a Tunisian laborer’s
kitchen, and the out-of-season Languedoc landscape. I liked
the challenge of a film whose central character we first encounter
frozen to death in a ditch and who is brought back to life only
to be returned irrevocably to extinction. But mostly I liked
the way the film does to its spectators what Mona the vagabond
does to those she encounters on her lonely road, leaving us
troubled, intrigued, and repulsed in equal measure. Seeing the
film made me want to write about it, in order to try to understand
how it had worked on me. Instead, I turned in a term paper that
was overly influenced by the theoretical orthodoxies of the
time and the mangled locutions that accompanied them. But even
that didn’t put me off the film. All these years later, I still
admire the way Varda leaves things out. The way her camera tarries
beside Mona as she trudges along but then abandons her in a
tracking shot that will come to rest on a piece of agricultural
machinery or a skeletal tree. The way Varda recruits the face-on
testimonies of those who have encountered Mona. And the way
Mona remains as much a mystery to them as she does to us.
Vagabond
was a turning point
in a difficult phase in Varda’s career, her first feature-length
fiction film in almost ten years, since One Sings, the Other
Doesn’t (1977). Between 1979 and 1981, Varda had tried
unsuccessfully to set up a picture in Los Ageneles and had made
seven documentary and essay films of various lengths (two in
the United States, the rest in France), before embarking on
Vagabond. The film proved to be one of her most successful
works, winning the Golden Lion at the 1985 Venice Film Festival
and a best actress Cesar for Bonnaire; it went on to be distributed
in fifteen countries. One of the films Varda made while in Los
Angeles was Documenteur (1981), the title a pun on
the French words for “documentary”
(documentaire)
and “liar” (menteur) and expressing her long-standing
suspicion toward the supposed objectivity of the documentary
form. In this respect, Varda shares the belief characteristic
of the nouvelle vague that the distinctions made between fiction
and documentary are mere generic niceties and that, cinematically
speaking, things get more interesting when the boundaries are
blurred and the subjective gaze of the filmmaker is asserted.
Since her debut with La Pointe Courte in 1954, Varda
has made only thirteen feature-length fiction films and more
than twice that number of documentaries, essay films, and shorts,
so it is hardly surprising that her features should be so consistently
marked by a combination of documentary and fiction, Vagabond
being a case in point.
Allied
to this stylistic hybridism—something gestured to in Varda’s
own coinage for her approach to filmmaking of “cinecriture”
(meaning “filmic writing”; the credits of Vagabond
read, “A film directed and cinecrit by Agnes Varda)—is
her abiding interest in those living at the margins of society.
Despite the sorrowful conditions sometimes depicted in her films,
one of the great pleasures of them is the sheer variety of people
and faces one encounters: from the lost and lonely Parisians
of rue Mouffetard (L’opera Mouffe, 1958) to the inhabitants
of Varda’s beloved rue Daguerre, the street in Paris where she
has lived since the 1950s (Daguerreotypes, 1976). Not
to forget her hugely acclaimed essay film The Gleaners and
I (2000), a wonderfully warm and personal journey through
the world of “gleaners,” who live off and work with the materials
that affluent society regards as garbage, which again introduces
its viewers to an unforgettable assortment of people.
Vagabond
likewise benefits
from its range of characters. Many of those whom we see paying
witness to Mona were played by nonactors cast from among local
people, from Assoun (Yahiaoui Assouna), the sympathetic Tunisian
farm laborer who befriends her, to the philosopher turned shepherd
(simply credited as Sylvian), who delivers a revealing critique
of Mona’s vagabondage. There’s a wonderful sequence that illustrates
the joyful consequences of such an approach—though in Varda’s
hands it’s as much an ethics of filmmaking as a casting decision—when
Mona, pretending to be a maid, meets the elderly proprietor
of a grand house, known as Aunt Lydie, played by Marthe Jarnias,
a nonactor whom Varda had previously cast in a short film (7p.,
cuis., s. de b.… [a saisir], 1984) and was so taken with
that she offered her a role in Vagabond. The old lady
and young girl share some cognac and are soon in gales of laughter
so unforced that it looks like Bonnaire can barely contain herself.
There
are two key stylistic figures in Vagabond—the series
of twelve tracking shots that feature throughout the film and
the to-camera testimonies of those who have encountered Mona.
These figures point to the archetypal story structures underpinning
the film: the stranger who walks into town and the multiple
points of view of those who encounter the stranger. Mona, however,
is not the “stranger” of westerns; she’s closer to Terence Stamp’s
“Visitor” in Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) or Christine
(Sasha Andres) in Siegrid Alnoy’s remarkable She’s One of
Us (2003)—both mysterious interlopers who act like distorting
mirrors to those who encounter them. In opting to tell her story
in this way, Varda could be said to be following the classic
examples of Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and Kurosawa’s
Rashomon (1950), although she states that her major
influence in this respect was the work of French novelist Nathalie
Sarraute, to whom the film is dedicated. The investigative structure
of the film is an attempt to reconstruct the final days of Mona’s
life through what Varda describes as “pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
that is inevitably incomplete” and reveals more about the people
who talk about her than Mona herself, who remains ungraspable
(the film’s working title was “A saisir,” a term that means
both “to seize” a property and “to understand” or “to grasp”
something).
In
Vagabond, Varda wanted “to film what freedom and dirt
meant,” themes that overlapped with her discovery while researching
the project that more and more young women were becoming vagrants.
“It was in the 1980s that very young girls began to appear on
the road and in doorways. They were not lost but had decided
to live out their freedom in a wild and solitary way. Duly hitting
the road, she offered rides to several of these young women,
including one named Setina, who plays a small role in the film.
According to Varda, Setina’s experiences informed the character
of Mona: “She knew that it was the vagrants’ smell, more than
their poverty, that set them apart from a society that values
cleanliness.” In a wonderful promotional tagline for the film,
Varda summed up Mona thus: “She’s cute, she stinks, and she
won’t say thank you,” asking the film’s prospective viewers,
“Would you offer her a lift?” Mona is a walking affront to the
world of polite society as represented by the well-heeled agronomist
Madame Landier (Macha Meril), who overcomes her revulsion at
the stench of the girl she gives a lift to and finds herself
fascinated by, albeit as a sociological specimen. When she fetches
canapes and Krug from an academic reception to share with Mona,
Landier asks her why she hasn’t made anything of her education
and has chosen to drop out. Mona’s minimal, eloquent riposte
is: “Champagne on the road’s better.” But, as we see, there’s
too little champagne and too much road. The question remains,
however: is Mona dirty because she’s free or free because she’s
dirty? Varda has explained she wanted Mona to be an unsympathetic
character. She is, but not in a completely alienating way, something
that’s harder to pull off in a film than a novel and has a lot
to do with the extraordinary charisma that the seventeen-year-old
Bonnaire brings to the role. The way that Mona weathers the
indignities of her chosen life of “freedom and dirt”—from the
everyday hustling for shelter and food to sexual abuse at the
hands of predatory males—implies a steely core. Mona’s curious
dignity makes her death sorrowful even in its inevitability.
One can only guess whether Varda, knowing that she had captured
such a magnificent performance from Bonnaire, felt safe in starting
the film with Mona dead. For while this approach lends what
follows the quality of an investigation, we still care about
Mona in a way that this form would appear to preclude.
While
Vagabond was prescient in picking up on the new social
phenomenon of France’s young female drifters, there’s another
dimension to its portrait of those who reject society that has
become more apparent in the twenty years since its original
release. This is most marked in Mona’s encounter with a shepherd
who gives her a trailer to live in and offers her a patch of
land to cultivate—an act of altruism that Mona treats with indifference.
The character is played by someone Varda had met while researching
the film, a former philosophy teacher who, with his wife and
child, had rejected conventional society and gone “back to the
land.” His frustration with Mona derives from the obstinate
lack of project or principle that he can discern behind her
choice of life. In this encounter we see the confrontation of
two different ideas of freedom: that of the counterculture generation
of May ’68, which, utopian as it might have been, nevertheless
had an ideologically defined conception of its rejection of
the dominant society, and the ostensibly nonideological revolt
represented by Mona, who is, in more ways than one, “without
roof or rules” (the literal translation of the film’s French
title). All these years later, in these new political times,
Mona’s defiant independence can be seen in even more negative
terms, as a logical extension of the culture of extreme individualism
that has come to dominate Western society since the 1980s. Mona,
the nomandic monad, knows only how to say no, and her atomized
life leads—just as the shepherd warns her it will—to a lonely
death.
Chris
Darke is a writer and film critic based in London. His work
has appeared in Film
Comment, Sight & Sound, Trafic, Cahiers du Cinema, Vertigo,
and the Independent. He is also the author of Light
Readings: Film Criticism and Screen Arts, a monograph of
Godard’s Alphaville, and Cannes: Inside the World’s
Premier Film Festival (with Kieron Corless). He
has directed occasional works, including a video portrait of
Chris Marker for Criterion’s release of Marker’s La jetee
and Sans Soleil.
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