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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.
