Lê, from Cine Suffragette and writer at the blog Crítica Retrô, invited me several months ago to contribute to an ebook collection called The Agnès Varda Files. The collection has recently been published, in both English and Portuguese, and you can find both versions at Amazon. My contribution to the ebook is the following essay entitled “Sans toit ni loi / Vagabond (1985): A Masterpiece from Agnès Varda.”
Vagabond is not a neo-noir, not a noir at all, but I do want to spread the word about both the film and the ebook collection. A lot of hard work went into the ebook from everyone who participated, especially from the folks at Cine Suffragette. Thanks to them and to Lê.
This post is also my own tribute to Agnès Varda, whom we lost not so very long ago, on March 29, 2019. I have now seen a few of Varda’s films, including Cléo de 5 à 7 / Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Visages Villages / Faces Places (2017), and all of them are extraordinary.
“Sans toit ni loi / Vagabond (1985): A Masterpiece from Agnès Varda”
Agnès Varda’s film Vagabond is stunning, a masterpiece that reveals so much so very simply. It’s almost as if Varda set up a camera and let events unfold in front of the lens, almost as if we are watching a documentary about real-life events. But that’s the finished product, the result of Varda’s work and imagination. She wrote, directed, and edited a story about a fictional young woman, Mona Bergeron, that is finely crafted and draws us in because we don’t know what will happen next, even though we know the main character’s ultimate fate.
Vagabond starts with a shot of a French vineyard in winter. A tractor plods slowly from the distant background toward the camera at the same time that the camera moves in . . . on what? It’s hard to see until the camera is almost upon him: a field hand. The camera’s movement, although simple and steady, creates a sense of foreboding. When the film cuts closer to the field hand, he discovers Mona Bergeron’s frozen and lifeless body in a ditch. Thus, viewers know the ending of the story nearly from the very beginning.
The film cuts to a scene where the camera pans a beach in the early morning sun, and the voice-over narrator, Agnès Varda herself, tells viewers, “No one claimed the body, so it went from a ditch to potter’s field . . . But people she had met recently remembered her. Those witnesses helped me tell about the last weeks of her last winter. She left her mark on them. They spoke of her, not knowing she had died. I didn’t tell them. Nor that her name was Mona Bergeron. I know little of her myself, but it seems to me she came from the sea.”
By now, the camera shows Mona walking out of the ocean and onto the beach. She is naked, innocent of her role in a film and innocent of the fact that two men watch her from a distance on a road. The camera actually takes the perspective of a spectator, the same as the two men on the road. But the introduction that Varda gives Mona is almost mythical. I thought immediately of the Italian Renaissance painting The Birth of Venus, by Sandro Botticelli.
The rest of the film tells us of the last few weeks of Mona’s life in a series of flashbacks, in a semidocumentary style that includes interviews with people who knew her in her last winter. Many of the people that Mona met in her last weeks talk directly to the camera about her. Not all of their testimony is positive, but it is still clear that Varda herself holds Mona in high esteem. What other people say of Mona often reveals more about themselves than it does about the main character, the subject of the film.
The two men on the beach are Paulo and his friend. They think Mona must be crazy to go into ice-cold ocean water. Paulo wants to talk to her, but his friend has to get to work, and it’s his motorbike that they are riding. They drive off, and the camera returns to Mona, now dressed and hitchhiking. Later Paulo tells his friend, “A girl all alone is easy!” We are beginning to see Mona as the world of the film sees her, and others don’t always see her as Varda does. Or as I did: I was already worrying about her at this point, and maybe that was Varda’s intention. (My concerns were justified: Mona is raped at one point later in the narrative by another man who finds her camping alone in the woods.)
Mona spends some time with a goatherd and his family. The goatherd seems to be living the most unconventional life of everyone else in the film—except for Mona, that is. He can identify with her because he once lived the vagabond life she is living, but he comes across as one of the most bourgeois characters in the film. He is also one of the most judgmental. He tells Mona that she is chasing freedom, but she is destroying herself. He could not stay on the road because of the loneliness. His friends who did stay on the road are either dead or alcoholics or junkies. When he talks to the camera about Mona, he says, “By proving she’s useless, she helps a system she rejects.” I’m not sure what to make of this comment except that it paints the goatherd in the worst possible light. He assumes a lot about what is useful and what the system or society ought to be. And he also assumes that Mona’s experiences and her reactions to them are the same as his.
Assoun, a vineyard worker (not the field hand who found her body at the start of the film) cares about Mona and wants to take care of her. When Mona meets Assoun, he is pruning grapevines in preparation for the upcoming season. He offers her a place to stay and food to eat. But when other workers return for the seasonal work, they force him to take a stand: He cannot allow Mona to stay in the same lodgings where they all live. Assoun doesn’t want to let Mona go, but he needs his job, and Mona is an intruder, a female one at that. Assoun’s coworkers are even more adamant that Mona should leave because she is a woman. Assoun’s memories of Mona are mixed with fondness and regret. After her departure, when he is in front of the camera again, he kisses the bright red scarf that Mona used to wear and had left behind when she was forced to leave. Then he stares bleakly into the camera without uttering a word. His actions speak for themselves.
Mrs. Landier, a university professor and researcher, starts asking Mona questions after giving her a ride. Then she asks Mona if her questions bother her. Mona tells her that drivers always have questions and that she tells them whatever she feels like telling them. Mona doesn’t seem to be interested one way or the other about what she says, what she reveals, or whether any of it is even accurate.
Paulo and his friend, the goatherd, and Mrs. Landier are just a few examples. Almost everyone who meets Mona Bergeron offers an opinion, but not Assoun and not the enigmatic Mona herself. She cares the least about what people think. Varda, in the role of filmmaker, solicits these interviews from other characters, but Mona does not stick around long enough or often enough to hear other people’s opinions.
I had just seen Vagabond for the first time when I received the invitation to contribute to this collection, The Agnès Varda Files, honoring Varda. I have seen only three of Varda’s films, but each one so far has been a powerful experience, and Vagabond is no exception. It’s a difficult film to watch in some ways, but Varda gets us to care about Mona, a precious life that a capitalistic and patriarchal society doesn’t seem to know what to do with. Maybe the distance that a film affords viewers is one of the best ways to get us to care. In spite of our distance as film viewers, we still think to ourselves, “What would my reactions be if I had met Mona myself?”
Viewers know almost from the start that Mona Bergeron is found frozen in a vineyard. In spite of this knowledge, I became thoroughly absorbed in the events leading up to her death. In spite of knowing Mona’s ultimate fate, I watched because I wanted to know what would result from each of Mona’s interactions, from each of her decisions. The result of each piece of Mona’s story is unpredictable, which I found fascinating. It’s as though Varda has created a slice-of-life story that mimics life: We all know the ultimate ending, but we go along for the ride and are fascinated nonetheless.
September 1985 (Venice Film Festival), December 4, 1985, release dates • Directed by Agnès Varda • Screenplay by Agnès Varda • Music by Joanne Bruzdowicz, Fred Chichin • Edited by Patricia Mazuy, Agnès Varda • Cinematography by Patrick Blossier
Sandrine Bonnaire as Mona Bergeron • Macha Méril as Madame Landier • Yolande Moreau as Yolande • Stéphane Freiss as Jean-Pierre • Setti Ramdane as Assoun • Francis Balchère as a police officer • Jean-Louis Perletti as a police officer • Urbain Causse as a farmer • Christophe Alcazar as a farmer • Joël Fosse as Paulo • Patrick Schmit as the truck driver • Daniel Bos as a demolition worker • Katy Champaud as the girl at the pump • Raymond Roulle as the old man with matches • Henri Fridlani as the gravedigger • Patrick Sokol as the boy with the sandwich • Pierre Imbert as the mechanic
Distributed by MK2 Diffusion • Produced by ciné-tamaris, films a 2
