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osprey_archerIn the raw early spring, in the south of France, a vine cutter discovers a young woman frozen to death in a ditch. This is the opening of Agnes Varda’s Vagabond, which then reels backward to tell us the tale of that young woman’s last few weeks as she drifted around the countryside, living in a tent, hitching rides, picking up work or men in order to get money, food, booze, grass.
We learn only a few details about her past. Her name is Mona; she once worked as a secretary, but gave it up. She had the option, then, of a more settled life, but instead took to the road because of... boredom? Laziness? A yearning for freedom? Wanderlust?
She is free do to what she wants, when she wants it, as long as it costs no money: when she went on the road she abandoned not only steady work and soap, but the entire concept of agreeability. Early on, we see her hitch a ride in a truck - which she promptly derides as a piece of junk, when she learns the radio doesn’t work. The truck driver just as promptly drops her off by the side of the road. She’s rude, he complains.
Different people offer different valuations of her character depending on their preconceived notions (all female drifters are grasping and man hungry, charges a garage owner - who we later see crawling out of her tent with his pants undone) or the circumstances under which they meet her. One young girl, disappointed in love herself, catches a glimpse of Mona and her fling-of-the-moment asleep in a gently decaying chateau they’ve broken into, and sees her as a symbol of love. (Soon after, this fling runs out of weed, and then gets beaten up by robbers. Mona ditches him.)
Is her solitude sad or enviable? Her rejection of work, community, obligations of all kinds - is that freedom, or is it living death, as a philosophy student turned goat farmer thinks? (“All my friends who stayed on the road died,” he tells her.) Is she a figure of sexual freedom or sexual vulnerability?
Nothing graphic is ever shown, but it’s clear that sex is one of the ways that Mona provides for herself on the road, along with occasional odd jobs (washing cars, cutting vines) and petty thievery. And her peripatetic life makes her vulnerable: a man attacks her as she camps in the forest, and the camera cuts away as Mona shouts “No!”
(Side note: people sometimes justify graphic rape scenes, for instance on Game of Thrones, on the grounds that it’s necessary for realism, but I’ve become very skeptical of this claim and Vagabond perfectly illustrates why. You don’t have to see the whole damn thing to know what happened.)
Who is the real Mona? I think the genius of the movie lies in the fact that it is, in the end, it commits to no simple interpretation, but shows Mona as a kaleidoscope: her many facets shake together differently at different times. She can be callously dismissive, as with the fling she abandons; or she can be great company, as when she gets roaring drunk with a rich, lonely old woman who no one else has time for.
Now, this doesn’t mean that all interpretations of Mona are equally correct: the garage owner and the romantic girl are clearly seeing what they want to see, for instance. But many seemingly-contradictory interpretations are more or less true. It all depends how the pieces in the kaleidoscope have fallen out that day.
***
I didn’t intentionally watch this movie in conjunction with Tallulah, but it’s been a fruitful pairing, because the contrast in the way that the two movies treat their main characters, both of whom are female drifters.
Tallulah wants you to like the title character, and although I did enjoy the movie, I think ultimately this desire warped it out of true. The movie softens many of Lu’s less appealing aspects (that glove compartment full of credit cards) and twists itself into a pretzel to ensure that you’re basically on Lu’s side when she kidnaps a baby. Showing that the baby’s mother is unfit isn’t enough: after the baby is kidnapped, no less than three characters step up to tell the mother so.
Vagabond doesn’t care if you like Mona. Indeed, in many ways it paints her in a quite unflattering light. She abandons one lover because he’s run out of weed; later on, she ditches another young man because she’s offered a ride as long as she’s traveling alone. She steals from people who try to help her. She uses people.
And yet you do come to like her - not perhaps in the sense that you’d want to sit down and have coffee with her (if for no other reason than that almost all the characters comment on how bad she smells) - but in the sense that you come to care a great deal what happens to her. There’s a plain honesty in her portrayal - both in the sense that she’s brutally honest and in the sense that the movie never flinches from showing us her uglier actions - that makes up for the lack of any more ordinary appeal.
And indeed, there’s something attractive about her very refusal to be appealing - her refusal to do anything that she doesn’t want to do, even if that something is as simple as politely refraining from complaining about the truck’s broken radio. Why does Mona go on the road? Because she wants to. It’s as simple and as baffling as that.
We learn only a few details about her past. Her name is Mona; she once worked as a secretary, but gave it up. She had the option, then, of a more settled life, but instead took to the road because of... boredom? Laziness? A yearning for freedom? Wanderlust?
She is free do to what she wants, when she wants it, as long as it costs no money: when she went on the road she abandoned not only steady work and soap, but the entire concept of agreeability. Early on, we see her hitch a ride in a truck - which she promptly derides as a piece of junk, when she learns the radio doesn’t work. The truck driver just as promptly drops her off by the side of the road. She’s rude, he complains.
Different people offer different valuations of her character depending on their preconceived notions (all female drifters are grasping and man hungry, charges a garage owner - who we later see crawling out of her tent with his pants undone) or the circumstances under which they meet her. One young girl, disappointed in love herself, catches a glimpse of Mona and her fling-of-the-moment asleep in a gently decaying chateau they’ve broken into, and sees her as a symbol of love. (Soon after, this fling runs out of weed, and then gets beaten up by robbers. Mona ditches him.)
Is her solitude sad or enviable? Her rejection of work, community, obligations of all kinds - is that freedom, or is it living death, as a philosophy student turned goat farmer thinks? (“All my friends who stayed on the road died,” he tells her.) Is she a figure of sexual freedom or sexual vulnerability?
Nothing graphic is ever shown, but it’s clear that sex is one of the ways that Mona provides for herself on the road, along with occasional odd jobs (washing cars, cutting vines) and petty thievery. And her peripatetic life makes her vulnerable: a man attacks her as she camps in the forest, and the camera cuts away as Mona shouts “No!”
(Side note: people sometimes justify graphic rape scenes, for instance on Game of Thrones, on the grounds that it’s necessary for realism, but I’ve become very skeptical of this claim and Vagabond perfectly illustrates why. You don’t have to see the whole damn thing to know what happened.)
Who is the real Mona? I think the genius of the movie lies in the fact that it is, in the end, it commits to no simple interpretation, but shows Mona as a kaleidoscope: her many facets shake together differently at different times. She can be callously dismissive, as with the fling she abandons; or she can be great company, as when she gets roaring drunk with a rich, lonely old woman who no one else has time for.
Now, this doesn’t mean that all interpretations of Mona are equally correct: the garage owner and the romantic girl are clearly seeing what they want to see, for instance. But many seemingly-contradictory interpretations are more or less true. It all depends how the pieces in the kaleidoscope have fallen out that day.
***
I didn’t intentionally watch this movie in conjunction with Tallulah, but it’s been a fruitful pairing, because the contrast in the way that the two movies treat their main characters, both of whom are female drifters.
Tallulah wants you to like the title character, and although I did enjoy the movie, I think ultimately this desire warped it out of true. The movie softens many of Lu’s less appealing aspects (that glove compartment full of credit cards) and twists itself into a pretzel to ensure that you’re basically on Lu’s side when she kidnaps a baby. Showing that the baby’s mother is unfit isn’t enough: after the baby is kidnapped, no less than three characters step up to tell the mother so.
Vagabond doesn’t care if you like Mona. Indeed, in many ways it paints her in a quite unflattering light. She abandons one lover because he’s run out of weed; later on, she ditches another young man because she’s offered a ride as long as she’s traveling alone. She steals from people who try to help her. She uses people.
And yet you do come to like her - not perhaps in the sense that you’d want to sit down and have coffee with her (if for no other reason than that almost all the characters comment on how bad she smells) - but in the sense that you come to care a great deal what happens to her. There’s a plain honesty in her portrayal - both in the sense that she’s brutally honest and in the sense that the movie never flinches from showing us her uglier actions - that makes up for the lack of any more ordinary appeal.
And indeed, there’s something attractive about her very refusal to be appealing - her refusal to do anything that she doesn’t want to do, even if that something is as simple as politely refraining from complaining about the truck’s broken radio. Why does Mona go on the road? Because she wants to. It’s as simple and as baffling as that.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 02:21 am (UTC)I guess the thing about doing exactly what you want, with absolutely no reference to what other people want, is that it can only achieve a very narrow--very very narrow--set of things. I guess even Mona ends up doing some things she doesn't want in order to get some things she does want (trading sex for stuff--maybe she couldn't care less about whether or not she has sex, but maybe she didn't particularly want to at a given moment, but does anyway in order to get x, y, or z.
Ideally I guess we grow so that considering what other people want isn't framed entirely in terms of "because then that will get me this other thing that **I** want, but it seems like Mona's missing even a lot of that very basic level of thing. It makes me wonder how she managed to spend however many years of life that she did spend in a more conventional existence.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 04:11 pm (UTC)And of course for Mona there's the added difficulty that some men see an unprotected girl on the road as an easy mark for sex. McCandless might have run into the same thing, but almost certainly not to the same extent.
And it really depends how you look at it how much freedom Mona has really achieved, in the end. On the one hand, she's no longer working for anyone - no one can order her around - and that's not nothing. But on the other hand, she's sort of being ordered around by circumstance, if that makes sense. Her boss can't force her to work, but her stomach can. But maybe to her that's worth it.
The movie doesn't give us enough backstory for me to know this for sure, but my feeling is that Mona's not missing the ability to consider what other people want; she's just decided she's sick of doing it. She gets along with people all right when she wants to get along, it's just that wants that much less often than most of the rest of us do.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 05:44 pm (UTC)I guess I can imagine a person who just doesn't want to have *people* dictating to them... it's not a thing that most of us mind so intensely, but I mean, some people are super photosensitive and wear dark glasses--and I guess this was her approach to handling her needs. Same with McCandless.
I think there could be ways to make life tolerable for people like Mona and McCandless that wouldn't require the choices they made (and consequences), but nothing works all the time for all people...
no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 07:55 pm (UTC)A lot of people do mellow with age. With people like McCandless, there may not be much to do but hope that their love of danger doesn't get them first. (Mona doesn't seem attracted to danger in quite the same way, but she also might have mellowed and settled down over time.)
no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 02:57 am (UTC)I like movies that do that: that don't ask you to care about their characters for any more reason than that they're people.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-01 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-02 01:47 pm (UTC)