I saw the long line of migrants by the Roosevelt Hotel. They were lumped behind crowd control barriers and I couldn’t help thinking about the pace given to or taken by the homeless, vagrants, and illegal migrants. It immediately brought to my mind Agnes Varda’s Vagabond.
I first watched this Vagabond when I was just a kid and my memories of it are still vivid. I remember the feelings of cold and humidity it gave me all along. Most of all, I remember Sandrine Bonnaire's ghostly face: a skull crossing fields streaked by dark furrows of frosted earth. I instinctively knew that this earth was to be graveyard dirt.
In Vagabond, Sandrine Bonnaire is Mona. She is not a figure of poverty or freedom as it has been often written but a figure of death. A voiceover mentions at the very start of the movie that Mona’s body “went from a ditch to a potter's field”. The end is announced from the first frame but as my text contains spoilers, you may want to stop reading here if you prefer to discover on your own the events leading to the potter’s field.
We are never told where Mona comes from or her past history. One of the first shots of the movie and the only one with a warm light shows her walking out of a glacial sea totally naked. Her body is seen from afar. “But it seems to me she came from the sea.” says a voice-over, as if Mona was more creature than woman. Two men are spying on her from behind a dune with the intention of raping her. Ultimately, they don't dare as if Mona is untouchable. One can sense fear in the flimsy excuses they give to each other for not acting.
The shepherd who shelters Mona for one night quickly puts this unease into words.
Mona is at the same time alive and dead. She doesn’t have a last name. It’s not even clear she has been born at all.
Any homeless person will tell you that the worst part of their condition is this feeling of not existing in the eyes of the world. And yet, they are here, occupying the space of a body in the street. Or are they?
Mona is raped in another scene but this is not shown and it seems like an event without special importance. It takes place out of the frame, somewhere in a forest, occupying almost no space either visually or narratively. The following shot shows Mona unfazed as if nothing happened. A few scenes later, she prostitutes herself for a spot to plant her tent. This too is shown as a casual transaction without special meaning or moral weight. Mona’s body is no longer part of a social norm. When she steals a small painting, it ends up being pierced: a hole is now at the center of the landscape on the canvas, just like Mona’s body is the hollow spot in the landscape of life around her. She is not really there.
For the people she crosses paths with she is also a window into death. The bourgeoise Madame Landier shelters her for a few hours but gets electrocuted by a faulty lamp shortly after Mona’s departure. Landier’s walls are covered by prints and paintings but when she narrates her near-death experience we learn that the image that came to her during the electric shock was Mona’s face.
Mona herself casually talks about death with an old lady she briefly meets. They laugh and drink to it. Unlike Margot Robbie, she doesn’t have to say: “do you guys ever think about dying?”. One look at her does the job.
Drinking, smoking, eating, having sex, and sleeping are the only things Mona does with humans. She never stays with anyone. She doesn’t seek friendship or love, doesn’t develop relationships of any kind, doesn’t keep anything from others, not even a scarf kindly given to her by an immigrant worker, and doesn't leave anything behind her either. She is chased from place to place or moves on her own will but the road is neither a way of escape nor a goal. Mona is going nowhere. She hovers.
She walks in circles, passing through the same villages and the same fields. Locations are repeated but Mona never gets her own space. Instinctively feeling that she is not part of their “living order”, people don’t let her get too close. She never gets invited to stay overnight in someone’s private home. It’s always a sheep pen, a car, a station’s waiting room, a squat in an abandoned house, or the communal barracks of seasonal workers. People look into her as in a mirror reflecting the possibility of their own death. She is a living Memento Mori.
Vagabond doesn’t denounce the condition of vagrants, women, or anyone else. It has at its core the very human need to make death visible, to give it a space, to embody it. Varda understands the need for all societies to see death and that the homeless are where we see ours even if briefly. If everyone is telling a story with their own life, the vagrants are too, and it is one of the most important stories of all.
You are a very fine writer, Estelle. If you would like to write or post a story on indiefilmreporter.com (full site launching in next month) please contact me: H. Scott Bayer - Publisher/Exec. Ed of Indie Film Reporter, indiefilmreporter@.gmail.com Here's one of my recent pieces - https://indieentertainmentmedia.com/yes-repeat-no-experimental-cinema-to-the-rescue/