vagabond (1985)
Agnes Varda's 1985 film Vagabond is a story that pieces together the final weeks of a young drifter, Mona, who is found dead in a ditch in rural France. Framed as a pseudo-documentary with characters who encountered Mona in the days before she died, it offers a fragmentary but powerful portrait of this character and the power of perception. There will be spoilers but this is one of those stories where we know the end from the very beginning.
Structurally, this movie reminded me to a significant degree of movies like Magnolia (1999), a story about several characters living their own lives and occasionally intersecting with one another. In this case they are bound together by the commonality of having had an encounter with Mona, the young woman who is the film's titular vagabond, but there are other threads which link them, painting a picture of a world which is more interconnected than we can see.
But Mona is the driving force here. In her early encounters, hitchhiking and asking for work or water or a place to buy bread, she simply says that she is "camping"; later on she tells one of her temporary traveling companions that she left behind a life as a secretary in the city in quest for freedom, but she also says that she makes up stories to satisfy the curiosity of those who offer her rides. Who is to say what she left behind, what she is running from?
We see Mona only through the perception of others. There are the low-rent crimesmen and ne'er-do-wells who see her primarily for her body, for what she can do for them; there is the Jean-Jacques Rousseau-ass philosophe-turned-goatherd who sees her for her potential to help prove his thesis that what we really need to be happy and fulfilled as humans is to return to the land and live out our own personal Stardew Valley; there's the maid who sees her as a person she can dote over and take care of; there's the heir who sees her mainly as a revolting other. Of the many people who tell us about their interactions with Mona, there's two of them, I think, who really see her as a person. And even then they are either unwilling or unable to really offer their help.
She encounters a vineyard laborer who offers to let her stay with him in exchange for help trimming the vines. I was almost tempted to say that he only saw in her a potential wife, but there is in their interactions a sincere kindness and tenderness; he seemed to genuinely want to help. But the rest of the laborers return from holiday and are unwilling to let her stay, and she leaves.
And she encounters a scientist studying a tree fungus that was introduced by American GIs in the second World War, who, though when she recounts the story on the phone talks about the revolting stench, seems to genuinely enjoy having the company. She steals hors d'oeuvres and champagne from parties for her, excitedly shows her off to her protege, and gives her a ride for quite a long way indeed, but when it's time for her to return home, she says it's time for them to part ways. Mona seems genuinely hurt at this--while she is no stranger to being kicked out and often has some choice words and impolite hand gestures to offer as a result, here she just looks resigned. Nothing gold can stay. The scientist later regrets this, and sends her protege to find her, but he is unable to perceive Mona as a person who might need help and instead only sees her at her lowest as too revolting to merit dignity--he vows over the phone never to report finding her to his mentor.
There is no grand reveal, no sinister mystery, to Mona's death. She died because things started going very badly for her, because circumstances beyond her control forced her to leave without her bag or her tent, to leave behind even the small stability she found staying at a squat; and in the end the gendarmes file it away as just another dead drifter.
We are left, ultimately, with only fragments of Mona's story to piece together. We can guess why Mona is on the road--she certainly doesn't seem like she fits in very well with polite society, to say the least--but we can't know. What we can know is that she was, ultimately, failed.
A lot of thoughts about this one, and I could go on for a while, so let's leave this post off with some stray thoughts.
The pseudo-documentary format felt very French, in a way I'm not sure I could entirely define; it didn't fully commit to the bit--one could easily imagine this film where the director is a present figure interviewing these characters, but while she (I think that's Varda's voice anyway?) does briefly suggest that that is what she has done, we never see the interviews. Some of the characters pause in the middle of a scene to address the camera directly; others seem to be recounting the story to a different character, rather than to the director. It makes the framing feel very self-aware.
This story feels very me-coded; I like shapeless fragmented non-traditional narratives about the lost and the broken that meander and focus on characters and their interactions.
One of Mona's warmest interactions is with an old lady that the rest of the cast who interacts with her at all treats as senile; in that exchange the old lady is very clearly doing just fine, mentally, is very aware of her situation and the conditions she's living in, but her eyesight is failing. We also only ever see the old lady from others' perspectives; I feel like this is meant to reinforce the themes of the power of perception, but it's something I'd need to focus on when revisiting the film.
In any case, I really enjoyed this one. Gave me a lot to think about and, though the list keeps growing as time goes by even as I have been trying to pare it down at least somewhat in recent years, it's definitely another one to add to the list of movies to rewatch. There's still a lot to learn from this one, I think.