France drama
1985
color 105 min.
Director: Agnes Varda
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1518L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
Vagabond has been called Agnès Varda's Ulysses, and with good reason. The comparison
with James Joyce's era-defining epic novel extends well beyond a recognizable similarity between
the two artists. Both writer and filmmaker occupy vanguard positions in the
history of their respective forms, each bringing an experimental vitality to his and her work
that affirms the social dimension of art. Just as Joyce attempted to describe contemporary
consciousness by reworking the Homeric foundation of modern culture, so does Varda model her
simple tale -- of a woman's place in today's complex and unresponsive world -- on that seminal
document of modernist cinema, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.
"If you tell the story of Citizen Kane," Varda has said, "it's not much of a story.
An old rich mogul man is dead. He said a word we don't understand. We don't discover so much,
just some pieces of his life and finally it is just a sled. Is that a story? It is not much.
So what makes Citizen Kane so interesting is the way [Welles] told us about the
man -- intriguing us about what people think about him." And, with as much perversity as
playfulness, Varda gives us the total inversion of Welles' masterpiece in Vagabond:
A young, poor vagrant woman is dead. She died in a way we don't understand. We don't
discover so much, just some pieces of her life and finally it is just a pagan ritual
of the vine.
This thin armature of a plot, "not much" in terms of the kind of action we are increasingly
subjected to on the movie screen, becomes the deep structure around which Varda paints a
vivid, engaging portrait of the texture of daily life in modern France. Through the range of
people that Varda's heroine Mona encounters in the last few weeks of her life (people of
all classes, from foreign workers to centuries-old peasant families, from professional women
and men to shopkeepers, construction workers, and truckdrivers, from young business people
on the make to social marginals of all ages), and through the variety of places that Mona's
journey takes her (from Arab migrant workers' vineyard housing to a goat farm run by university
dropouts, from an abandoned 17th-century mansion-turned-playground for stoned hippies to a
professional conference in a well-heeled suburban hotel), we learn a documentary lesson
about contemporary society while we discover new insights about ourselves and the cultural
and subjective attitudes that shape us.
Yet Varda is not content to simply present us with a ready-made world. Directly related to
the specific attention to local detail in each of Mona's encounters is the implicit demand
for our own opinions as viewers. And, through Varda's brilliant mix of documentary and
fiction, our own thoughts and suggestions seem to be treated as if we, too, were actual
participants in Mona's world. (This strategy of interweaving "real" events and places with
constructed fictions of both character and plot has been central to Varda's work since her
first feature film, La Pointe courte (1954), which literally inaugurated the
French New Wave by antedating both Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and François
Truffaut's The 400 Blows (both 1959) by several years.) Each "witness" who remembers
Mona has a story to tell, but the line between actual French people and actors playing
characters is always ambiguously drawn. Mona herself is based on a young vagabond whom
Varda met on the road (she even has a small role in the film), while many of Mona's
experiences are evidence of Varda's inventive artistry. Yet Varda is always conscious of
the precarious balance between fact and fiction in a medium that can only exist by virtue
of the spectator's imagination. From her single voiceover address to the viewer (that sets
into place the parameters by which to investigate Mona's life) to her assertion of the writer's
hand in the opening credits of the film (Cinécrit par Agnès Varda), the director
makes it clear that while what we see looks like reality, our engagement with it requires,
as do all works of art, our imaginative capability and a sense of respect. And while the
film has the casual quality of a travelogue or a loosely-sketched portrait, it provides
many opportunities for serious thought. For this reason, in this perplexing, disturbing,
and ultimately unexplainable film, there are true moments of pure grace, dazzling and
unexpected instances of the sublime that make Vagabond, rather than a cynical
invitation to drop out, a Whitmanesque celebration of everything human.
-- Sandy Flitterman-Lewis
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis is the author of To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema,
as well as numerous articles and anthology chapters on feminist theory, film, and cultural
studies.
Cast
Mona Bergeron: Sandrine Bonnaire
Mme. Landier: Macha Méril
Tante Lydie: Marthe Jarnias
Yolande: Yolande Moreau
Assoun: Yahiaoui Assouna
Credits
Director and
Screenwriter: Agnès Varda
Cinematography: Patrick Blossier
Sound: Jean-Paul Mugel
Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz
Editing: Agnès Varda, Patricia Mazuy
Produced by Ciné-Tamaris, Films A2
with the participation of
The French Ministry of Culture
Transfer
Vagabond is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1. This new digital
transfer was created using a 35mm interpositive and the 35mm magnetic mono soundtrack.
The transfer was supervised by Agnès Varda.
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