Vagabond (1985)

Not rated, but let's call it.  This would be rated R.  There's some blurry nudity.  There's a sexual assault that happens off camera.  There's a very frank portrayal of death.  Drug use and alcohol use are fairly commonplace in this movie.  It's a pretty bleak film full of things that make you sad about life.  But nothing in this is overly exploitative.  Still, it gets heavy.

DIRECTOR:  Agnes Varda

Oh my goodness! I  played catch up on the blog.  I have to tell you, this is the Varda I was waiting for.  It might be another hard one to write about because I genuinely love this movie so much. It's what made me want to buy the Agnes Varda set.  

Now that I've seen an exceptional amount of Varda, Vagabond is simultaneously the most Varda thing and the least Varda thing I've watched so far.  Varda, God bless her, was incredibly socially conscious.  She understood the fundamental necessity for the artist to use her voice to actually say something of substance.  Now, my frustration with some of Varda's works has come with the fact that she sometimes wields that social commentary with a boring sledgehammer.  Again, my entire headcanon is that Varda sometimes gets in her own way.  But Vagabond isn't quite that.  Oh, Vagabond is blunt.  Typical Varda.  But it is also made with a craft that Varda doesn't always put in her movies.

This is something I'm coming to terms with.  Varda always seems to partially excuse craft with passion.  That's a completely unfair assessment because I wasn't there when her movies were made.  For someone who almost exclusively dealt with either experimental film or films with a little bit of an avant-garde bent, for all I know funding was nonexistent. But Varda's films outside of Vagabond and maybe a few other movies (Cleo from 5 to 7?), it always feels like Varda thrives in the unpolished.   It's almost an embrace of garage band culture.  When I think of her special effects or more surreal elements, it always has a DIY element to it.  I'm not saying that I'm against this.  It's just weird knowing that something like Vagabond exists.  Those DIY, guerilla filmaker moments seem somehow a little lazy knowing that something like Vagabond was something that Varda made in 1985.  We're not even in prime Varda era right now.  She was a creature of the nouvelle vague.  But this is 1985!  And the movie slaps.  Like, there are Varda elements, like with all of the interviews with the NPCs of the story.  But if you didn't know that Varda made this movie, it would be really hard to tell.  Yes, it still feels like Varda, but not in a way that makes it feels like she's resting on her bag of tricks.

Okay, it's been days since I wrote the first part of this blog, so I'm just going to throw up everything I can remember about this movie and stop talking about Varda.  Listen, if you haven't noticed me being a bleeding heart liberal on this blog, then you've probably missed the code behind everything I've written.  I think the first thing that I've really been moved over is the plight of the poor.  Now, Varda does something way more nuanced than I thought possible with her.  Yeah, this is a  movie aggressively about what it means to be homeless for a year.  She starts the story with the protagonist dead in a ditch.  The entire film is a flashback from that point on.  Cool.  We know that Mona is going to die.  We don't know how long that it is going to take from moment one, but we know that things aren't going to go well for Mona.  Now, the most Varda-y thing in the movie is the fact that this almost shifts to mockumentary by having NPCs answering questions to a police investigator who is trying to find out the timeline for Mona.  Now, it almost gets a little silly because some of these moments are more like fourth-wall breaks where these characters just voice their thoughts about Mona.  

Okay, but if the entire notion of making a movie about poverty through the eyes of a woman seems a little on the nose, Varda's choices to characterize Mona is fascinating.  My natural tendency is to side with Mona.  We never really get a clear timeline of what led Mona into this lifestyle, but it really reads as an act of rebellion.  Whether that rebellion is against a parent, a lover, all of society?  All of the above?  we don't really get. (Yeah, I played fast and loose with the rules of punctuation.)  And while I do sympathize with Mona, she's also incredibly frustrating as a human being.  Varda makes this movie seemingly with an attempt to make us empathize with the homeless and yet makes Mona someone you want to shake out of self-destructive behaviors.  Like, there are a lot of situations where Mona's expectations are incredibly basic and she almost prides herself on being defined by her own rules.  

Some of these are even the basic tenets of kindness.  There's the guy with the lock and chain around his neck.  This guy didn't ask a darned thing out of Mona.  He gave her all of his drugs and let her hang out.  But when he was being assaulted, Mona just bailed with a bunch of his stuff.  Yeah, I can see her getting frustrated with the goat hearders.  Not because the goat hearders are in the wrong.  No, I just don't see someone like Mona really wanting to be so disciplined to take care of a plot of land.  When they start asking for a modicum of help on the farm, we know that Mona's not wired to have that kind of structure.  But it is still wildly frustrating to hear that the patriarch of the goat hearders is so willing to not only give her a plot of land, but also help her get it started and she still demonizes him.  

Still, I do feel for Mona.  I don't want to associate myself with Mme Landier, but I think we as intellectual audiences are meant to tie ourselves to her as an avatar.  I don't see Mona through Landier's eyes.  But out of all of the characters, that's the closest.  (Hey, side thought that I promised I would put in this blog.  Do you understand how much I wanted to offer to clean Mona's clothes.  One of the things that Landier pointed out was how bad Mona smelled.  You could just...offer to wash her clothes.) Anyway, I don't see the reality of wanting to track someone like Mona down.  Yes, those anxieties of what could have happened to Mona in those woods was accurate.  It doesn't mean that Mme Landier had a chance of re-encountering her out there.

I actually grew a little frustrated with one of the devices that Varda uses.  I don't like the "It's a Small World" attitude that the film presents.  I get that there is an element that "We're never as far from the homeless as we think we are."  But the fact that everyone is somehow connected to everyone who Mona interacts with is darned frustrating.  It's such a grounded movie and to have everyone somehow know Mona is just a bit silly.  I know it gives us that one moment when Landier's assistant runs into Mona while searching for her and that we're supposed to feel frustrated with him when he refuses to contact Landier when he finds Mona.  But I don't think the inimate relationships work as well as Varda wants it to.

Still, I adore this movie.  I feel for Mona so hard.  The fact that every relationship in her life has a ephemeral quality.  When that house is burning down around the sleeping Mona and no one bothered to wake her up, it depresses me in the way that it should.  This is a story about lonliness as much as it is a story about homelessness. If Varda's goal was to make me feel deeply about a cause, Vagabond does it better than anything else she's made.