Vagabond (1985)

A young girl is lying there, frozen to death – in a ditch.

The rest of the film fills in how she – Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) – got there.

She was a homeless dirty drifter hitching around in winter with a backpack and a thin tent. She appears to be a non-interest sort of person. Rejecting first before she gets rejected. The people she encounters give their impressions of her in a mock-documentary type of way: “She had a vacant stare like a vagrant”

The camera continues roaming randomly around picking people up that pick up Mona. I’m wondering if the film is meant to be as much about these others as it is about Mona. We get reflections of Mona refracted, and distorted, through them.

“Weve all got to do our thing” says philosophal goatherder, “You chose total freedom but you got total loneliness”. He’s getting as fed up of her as I am, “You sleep all the time, we work all the time. It’s not fair, and it’s dirty here” (in the caravan he’s letting her doss in)

This was Sandrine Bonnaires first film role (aged 17). It’s sort of unself-consciously anti-glam. And anti-acting (too much) She’s been encouraged to go naturale and be natural. Flatten down any obvious emoting or affectation. Don’t be too cute. Don’t get too heroine like. She hasn’t got anything heroic to depict. This isn’t a heroic life of suffering or coming through suffering to some sort of redemptive self-knowledge. She’s learning nothing. This wandering life is not making her an improved person. Nothing transformative is going to happen. We sort of know that all along (because of flagging up her dirty ditch death right at the beginning) Her journey wiil have to be doggedly anti journey. No getting anywhere to anywhere better. Just this dreary drifting around from one aimless bit of chance circumstance to the next.

It’s all trying to be too true to life. An observational rather than a psychological study. Showing, but not telling, us how it is. The dirty reality of disenfranchised marginalised lifes; maybe for the time (1985) and the place (France) this was relatively novel; but now – 30 years on – we’re saturated with documentaries showing every kind of gritty shitty reality; you name it, we’ve seen it, and had our nosey noses stuck in it. So this film doesn’t have the same kind of shocking, or disturbing, impact that it may have done back in 1985; watching from where I am now it comes across as a constructed film fabrication of a wilfully unconstructed life; a proper – as in, genuine – straight documentary treatment, unadorned with any feature film pretensions might have worked better in getting this nose (mine) nearer to the ground. I couldn’t really, authentically, smell her (even though there’s constant reference to how much she stinks)

And Varda doesn’t give us much psychological context; we find out next to nothing about Mona’s backstory, why she’s ended up on the road; Mona offers little in the way of personal insight, or even personality when we’re tracking her around. She’s like a blank, blanked out slate. She’s not contributing much to the people she encounters, or giving us (the viewers) much to engage with either.

I’m gradually becoming bored with and by her. Feeling as indifferent towards her as she is to everybody else. A lazy, sullen, uncommunicative person – mostly, only, self-interested in smoking, getting off her face on dope and cheap booze, idly lying around reading books, getting herself shagged (and raped) but kind of impassively stumbling through it all – as if nothing much is registering or leaving a mark.

The tag-line to this film when it came out was: “Would you give her a lift?”

Would I? Yes, I suppose I would have. But I wouldn’t have gone far with her. I’d have dropped her out well before the 105 minutes this film dragged on for. And not because she was a stinky skank. But because she’s a selfish sponger. Who gave me nothing. No conversation, no chat. Not even a smile or a thank you.

Dir: Agnes Varda, France

6/10 Because it felt like a bleak, unenlightening, ordeal. Disaffecting rather than heart-wrenchingly engaging.