Over the past week at the Seoul Cinematheque I’ve continued to enjoy their Cine-Vacances program, especially the line-up of French cinema, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s PIERROT LE FOU (1965) and Luis Bunuel’s BELLE DE JOUR (1967). But these films were both already very familiar to me. The real revelation was Agnes Varda’s 1985 film VAGABOND, one of the great works of the decade. Like her contemporaries Godard and Truffaut, Varda was part of the French New Wave of the late 50s/early 60s, contributing such well-known landmarks as CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (1962) and LE BONHEUR (1965). But Varda was always more associated with the Left-bank filmmakers, such as Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, directors with more sociological and political interest than the group assembled around the CAHIERS DU CINEMA (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer). This can be seen in the Left-bank group’s greater interest in documentary and in their overall engagement with French politics, which Godard would only really explore as the 60s progressed and he moved further from the New Wave and which the others  would rarely confront directly.  Varda was not as politically engaged as Resnais in the 60s, when he was making such works as HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959) and MURIEL (1963), but her sociological interest was always present and one can argue peaked with VAGABOND, her masterpiece.

VAGABOND begins with the discovery of the frozen body of a homeless woman (played by Sandrine Bonnaire). It then employs numerous flashbacks to show us the last few weeks of her life, concluding at the same place as we began, with her dying in a ditch. The story is thus very circular, not depending on a strong linear momentum but instead focusing on the day to day life and activities of the woman and her various relationships with the people she meets along the way. This is a familiar strategy of art cinema, employing a more episodic plotting rather than the straightforward goal-oriented protagonist of Hollywood. It is also fitting as a metaphor for the lead character, who has dropped out of the regular ambitions of ordinary society. But Varda’s choice of audience address in the film is quite unique. After the discovery of the body, we are given a voice-over narration that feels like a direct address to the audience from the director or storyteller of the film (it is in fact Varda’s voice), informing us that she researched the woman’s life, discovered her name (Mona Bergeron), and interviewed many people who encountered her over the final weeks of her life. There is thus a strong documentary element to the film, which is re-enforced by Varda’s realist style. What is unusual, however, is that this narrator or documentarian does not really exist as a person. After the opening voice-over, we never hear or see this person again, even though characters in the film frequently break the fourth wall and talk to the camera, implying someone is present or, perhaps, that we have effectively taken over this role.

The result works effectively in accomplishing what the narrator tells us at the beginning: that Mona’s life has to be viewed through the people she encountered and the impact she had on their lives. In this way, the film reminded me a great deal of Abbas Kiarostami’s A TASTE OF CHERRY (1997), in which the lead character remains essentially a mystery and we as an audience are forced into a position similar to the supporting characters, trying to figure out this enigma of a lead character.

Although she is made sympathetic by Varda and Bonnaire, Mona is treated complexly and without sentimentality. There is a key early scene where she encounters a philosopher-turned-farmer who offers her land in which to work. Instead, Mona decides to lay around and get high, conforming to the worst stereotypes of the homeless as lazy, unmotivated, and largely responsible for their own fate. Certainly, Mona is self-destructive, unable or unwilling to conform to mainstream society. But Varda reverses this stereotype at other points in the story, most importantly when Mona meets a Tunisian worker who she helps work with in the fields. Because she is treated by him as a fellow worker rather than as a tenant, she seems more willing to participate. Unfortunately for Mona, the man’s fellow workers do not allow her to stay, and thus she is forced to wander once again. While it is true that Mona does love to smoke marijuana, the idea that she is a drug addict is undercut by a shot in which she is given a needle to draw blood, which she does to earn money. Thus the bourgeois woman’s accusation is proven false, as well hypocritical, in that she is not working to get ahead but simply waiting for her husband’s aunt to die so she can move into a nicer place (Varda includes a sly reference to Fritz Lang’s SCARLET STREET (1945) here with the man painting her toe nails).

Although it is not pushed hard, the racism, sexism and general intolerance of the society are clues as to why Mona has decided to drop out. This social critique is made most explicit near the film’s conclusion, where Mona briefly bonds with the old woman whose nephew is basically waiting for her to die. If most audience members are ultimately closer in viewpoint or at least social positions with those she meets, so much the better, as the film becomes less about an individual case study and more about the larger social context.

Varda’s style is the key, a mixture of realism and formalism very reminiscent of the New Wave. Like the opening voice-over, Varda shifts from a realistic presentation to more formal devices. Varda employs many long takes and her camerawork and on-location shooting aim to present verisimilitude, an illusion that the audience is watching believable events. But just as the direct address to the camera breaks this fourth wall, so does Varda’s style, especially her moving camera. Used so often it becomes a kind of self-conscious motif, the camera constantly moves laterally, usually right to left instead of the more conventional left to right.

The result is a sense of moving back in time instead of going forward, of a circular rather than linear progression. We can think of film style here in a similar way. Usually realism and formalism are considered opposite ends of a spectrum, but the New Wave were among the first to see it more circular, that the further you pushed realist devices like long takes, the more likely the audience would notice the formal apparatus. VAGABOND is very much a film in this tradition, while also moving forward and paying attention to the world of France circa 1985. For those familiar with Varda’s more recent work, there is a clear antecedent here to her documentary THE GLEANERS AND I (2000), which I would also highly recommend.

VAGABOND is playing again at the Cinematheque on Sunday, August 22nd at 2:00 pm.

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