Sans toit ni loi
Agnès Varda (1985)
Although her later films were all documentaries, Agnès Varda spent a large part of her long career bringing works of fiction as well as non-fiction to the screen. In Vagabond, one of her most celebrated movies, she brings quasi-documentary techniques to bear in creating a drama. One winter’s morning (in the present day), in the Languedoc-Roussillon wine-growing region of southern France, an agricultural worker comes upon the frozen corpse of a young woman. Varda then proceeds to tell the story of how Mona Bergeron (Sandrine Bonnaire) ended up dead in a ditch. The narrative includes dramatisation of Mona’s last days and interviews with some of the people she encountered during them. Several of these witnesses, speaking to camera, wonder what became of Mona or, knowing her fate, express regret that they didn’t do more to help her.
That distinction makes clear that Vagabond isn’t a straightforward faux-documentary: it implies that the unseen, unheard interviewer (if s/he exists at all) may not have consistently informed the people concerned that, where or how Mona died. Yet the combination of documentary elements and dramatised flashback is beguiling and gives the impression that Varda is doing something very unusual. She’s finding out what actually happened to – in effect, bringing back to life – a homeless person who fell through the cracks of the social order and who, in reality, would probably remain a mystery – if, that is, she wasn’t forgotten as if she’d never existed.
The film is exasperating, though. Varda’s complex approach, in spite of Sandrine Bonnaire’s strong presence and performance, yields few insights into Mona’s character or even information about her personal history. If this were one of Varda’s real documentaries, I think her intense interest in people would make her push harder than Vagabond does to discover more. Instead, it’s as if the surface ‘reality’ is being used as a reason for the limits of the film’s exploration – of Mona and even, with a couple of exceptions, the attitudes towards her of other members of society.
Two episodes in particular reflect this. Mona hitches a lift with Mme Landier (Macha Méril), an academic on her way back from a conference. She buys food and drink for the journey for them both, and lets Mona sleep in the car while she’s in her motel room. Mme Landier learns from their conversation that Mona’s real name is Simone, that she was properly educated and that she had a secretarial job in Paris before going on the road instead. Asked why she dropped out, Mona says because she prefers drinking champagne in a car, as the two women are doing at that moment. Mme Landier is evidently interested by Mona and unafraid to probe but there are no more questions from her.
Later, Mona meets Assoun (Yahiaoui Assoun), an immigrant labourer. With his boss’s agreement, she moves into the primitive accommodation Assoun shares with other labourers. He also instructs her in his job of cutting vines. He’s a lone Tunisian in a work force of Moroccans, all temporarily returned home to see their families. Assoun is the one person in Vagabond whom Mona clearly likes but it’s obvious, and would be obvious to her, that, when he assures her she’ll still have a roof over her head when the Moroccans return, that’s not going to happen. Her shocked anger with Assoun when he tells her she has to go because the other men won’t have her didn’t make sense to me. Although the episode does raise the important question of how much Mona is still committed to an itinerant life, this isn’t pursued. The tantalising nature of the Mme Landier and Assoun chapters are in contrast to the recurrence of some other characters in Vagabond, which in the context of the narrative as a whole, feels too shaped.
Varda’s cast includes professional and previously non-professional actors. It’s obvious which are which even though I recognised only Sandrine Bonnaire and, as an old woman’s discontented maid who romanticises Mona’s ‘freedom’, Yolande Moreau (the title character in Séraphine many years later). I wasn’t sure how much this disjuncture of performing styles was intended. It’s typical of Varda that she treats her protagonist with compassion but without sentimentality. Mona isn’t easy to like and, says one of the interviewees, ‘helps the system that she rejects’. But the viewer ends up feeling about her little more than the guilt professed by some of the characters in Vagabond – the same kind of guilt we’d have felt if the end of a young woman like this had been a brief news item rather than a formally ambitious 105-minute drama. Perhaps Agnès Varda is aiming to make her audience feel guilty about not feeling guilty enough. But Varda also engineers our limited sympathy: she’s no more willing than Mona herself is to tell us more.
20 July 2019
