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Vagabond Revisited
November 27, 2023Agnes Varda’s Vagabond (1985) is a film about a young woman, Mona, who actively chooses to live the life of a hitchhiking drifter over her previously secure preoccupation as a shorthand-typist. The film follows accounts that lay out a depiction of her encounters with people on the road over the last winter that precedes her death. Using techniques employed by Italian neorealists that bleed into the essence of this film, I will argue Vagabond (1985) provides a scathing social and political commentary on poverty, disenfranchised youth and housing conditions, all filtered through the lens of female inequality as witnessed around the experiences of Mona. Furthermore, I will also show how Italian neorealist film techniques in and of itself mirror the Vagabond protagonist, forming a functional duality in addition to the initial significance of what Varda narratively conveys through its usage.
The film opens with a wide shot over a barren field. In this opening shot, the influence of Italian neorealism is prominent in its use of scenery and environment on location as an embodiment of the inner social and political turmoil of the character (Kovács, 2008). The barren field in the background allegorically reflects on a lack of opportunity, harvest, and abundance for the future and current impoverished generation. The fields presumably once ripe with harvest have been stripped completely as if there is a refusal to share this accumulated wealth. Mona is thus left to wander on without much meaning or success. Historically speaking, this malaise, disenfranchisement and alienation of Mona as vagabond is possibly referring to the social situation of France in the late 1960’s, which marked the end of the French New Wave period in film that witnessed an increase in France’s social stratification (Neupert, 2007). Public education at this time enforced divergent paths of early education which separated students into intellectual and practical tracks and limited upwards mobility for the latter. Similarly, Fabe (2014) describes that “[t]he problems and conflicts of neorealist protagonists derive less from inner psychological turmoil than from external social conditions.” In this way, it can be said Mona was betrayed by her environment that relates to this social stratification. Instead of nourishing her, these fields provide her with more hunger and discontent. Moreover, in the film Mona embarrassingly reveals that she herself graduated from vocational school as a practical shorthand-typist to none other than an intellectual university professor: her contrasting track. The stratification between them is palpable onscreen as the professor has a respectable job, possesses mobility in the form of her own car, and an appearance that is aesthetically opposite to the ragged and destitute Mona.
Going back to the use of environments on location, this observation is intensified by the many elements made visible in this shot though another Italian Neorealist technique of employing a wide depth of field (Fabe, 2014). As if observing a painting, the background and foreground of the shot become loaded with meaning from the events unfolding on each layer. In the background that contains the barren field, there is a singular tractor, which emphasizes the shift towards technological machinery over mass human employment. The foreground of the opening shot portrays a similar poetic vision in line with that motif. There are two trees adjacent to one another in the foreground: a large healthy tree and a stunted dwarf tree. It appears that the large healthy tree has sucked all the nutrients and opportunity for growth away from the adjacent stunted tree. Varda could be said to relate this relationship between the trees onto the stratified nature of youthful poverty against the established wealth. Under the shade of the dominant society, the impoverished youth have nothing to grow on. This is elaborated by Kovács (2008), who describes neorealist technique to follow that “The environment does not exist outside the character, and vice versa, the character is always depicted in relation to his environment.” Despite the absence of the protagonist in this opening frame, we are nonetheless exemplifying her situation through the environment and the elements within it. Following this logic, can it not then be said that this technique of environment embodying the character in the absence of the character doesn’t in and of itself also embody the disenfranchised youth: the vagabond who is usually absent and hidden from public visibility as they wander? If they are indeed seen, how often is it simply met with a blind eye that similarly renders them invisible within the environment? Gone in the mind’s eye indeed, but like feelings conveyed in viewing the barren field and stunted tree, nonetheless still vaguely present.
The narrative significance of trees persists in the film through its implicit presence in dialogue and characters. Mona meets and hitches a ride with a professor who researches on diseased trees. It is explained in the film that French Plane trees are dying from a fungus originating from infected US Plane tree crates carrying weapons cargo. Varda could possibly be insinuating American ideologies infecting French society, foregrounding the emergence of disenfranchised youth like Mona. Likewise, the allegorical nature of trees is further emphasized in the dialogue between the professor and her research associate. She refers to Mona as “taken root in her car,” to which her research associate responds, “Shall I show her how we uproot sick trees?” This conversation all but confirms Mona’s allegorical connection to trees, and in this case it is stressed that she is being compared to one of the infected ones.
By the film’s end, it becomes obvious that Mona is killed by the environment she inhabits quite literally as represented by anthropomorphized trees. She stumbles upon a village that is celebrating the festival of Pailhasses, wherein men in grotesque tree costumes throw wine on random people in what is described as “a free expression of chaos, destruction and sexual freedom” (Peixoto, 2019). It can be said that these properties of corruption marked on the vagabond finally caught up with Mona, as she ends up covered in wine as if soaked in her own drawn blood. Moreover the environment, which explicitly includes grape vineyards that she had often wandered, toiled and resided in throughout the film, had finally caught up with her as an unsustainable lifestyle. The grotesque tree monsters become a literal form of her usual environment, to the effect that Mona is being attacked by the environment she typically inhabits. Being herself compared to as a tree previously, it can also be said that she is also killing herself. It is directly after this scene that she falls into a ditch and motionlessly passes away. Conversely, in the opening sequences of the film, accounts of her death were interspersed with a cleansing of the wine stained town, as if conveying Mona being washed away from life. To add to the Neorealist bent of Vagabond further, this end of Varda’s film mirrors the conclusion of Neorealist films, which “also tend to end abruptly, without closure… and problems unresolved” (Fabe, 2014). In the same way, Mona’s death is abrupt and provides no closure that solves her problem or that lingering in society. In this way, Varda not only constructs an opening scene in itself that is loaded with thematic symbolism such as that suggested by the trees, but is furthermore supported by narrative plot points to undeniably add weight to be taken as cinematically significant beyond sensational aesthetics.
It must not be underemphasized either that this on location barren field environment, along with others that evoke similar social and political significance, is repeatedly featured by Varda throughout the film. This repetition of appearance of these environments adds significance to the implicit meaning as to why they are being shown. Barren fields are featured multiple times throughout the film as Mona wanders past them. The thematic power evoked by the environment of abandoned houses are similarly featured throughout the film. Various scenes in Vagabond randomly feature the full facade of abandoned houses on their own, despite adding no face value to the protagonist’s own narrative. Dialogue however substantiates the significance of this particular environment to the film, as witnessed through a conversation between Mona and a truck driver talking about the housing crisis. The truck driver explains ”Ninety thousand [occupied beds] in the summer. Only three thousand in winter,” to which Mona responds, “That leaves eighty seven thousand empty beds!” The housing problem is thus stressed through articulating an obscene abundance of the housing available against its unavailability for the smaller homeless population who need it. Through Varda’s dialogue, the sociological context of the film regarding an abundance of wealth inaccessible to the young that are in desperate need of it becomes increasingly clear, and so does the allegorical significance of the abandoned house motif.
Aside from the clear social commentary on poverty and housing, the abandoned house could also be said to represent Mona herself. She is likewise someone abandoned by her family. At one point of the film, Mona inhabits an abandoned Chateau as if occupying the Chateau’s character. The Chateau itself, which one could perceive to be once full of promise and potential, is now destitute, squalid and in disrepair. Just like the barren field, it is in this sense that she inhabits the abandoned mansion as if they are one and the same. Mona, once probably vibrant and youthful, is herself now caked in dirt and dressed in coarse clothes, which reflects the degeneration of these houses featured in the film. Conversely it can be said that Varda makes use of the environment as an extension of the psychological and physiological nature of Mona, who in turn is a reflection of the oppressed French youth.
The environment of walls is also very heavily present in the film. These are prominently featured in several dolly shots that are almost oblivious to Mona’s presence as she walks past these flat barriers. Like Mona, the walls are cracked, worn down, and at times crumbling to the point of lost functionality. The walls in itself could represent barriers that are present to people in poverty, having no way beyond it. The dolly shots all begin with the same discordant music, with Mona either initially present in the frame or entering the frame as it follows her walking along it. However, Varda takes a very intriguing turn from the Hollywood convention of maintaining the prominence of protagonist presence as she ends these dolly shots abandoning Mona from the frame as if ignoring her presence. Kovács (2008) similarly sees this technique used by the Italian Neorealists in that “[w]hen Antonioni turns his camera away, it is to show the indifference of the environment and to maintain the atmosphere of isolation or alienation.” The camera walks past her as if she was insignificant. Conversely, it can be said that Hollywood convention was abandoned to prove a point. Varda is calling attention to how French youth are seen but ultimately ignored and not heard. The environment is indifferent. We see them, ambivalently follow them with our eyes, but eventually all end up ignoring their pitiful form and avert our gaze like the camera does.
Along with shooting on location, Varda follows the Italian Neorealist method of a story seemingly centred on aimless wandering (Kovács, 2008). The word vagabond in itself means wanderer, and thus undoubtably embodies this neorealist technique. For the entirety of the film, there is no goal that provides the narrative or the protagonist agency. Mona, is simply wandering through France and faces what Varda constructs as random encounters that end in her death. She interacts with truck drivers, car repair workers, goat farmers, immigrant pickers: all men employed and housed while she remains untethered to any home. Particular mention needs to be stressed on the women she encounters. While the men all push her away eventually, making her move on from one place to the next, Varda designates the women in the film to take a special desire in Mona’s situation despite the reality of it. The maid Yolande speaks directly to the camera audience as she voices her envy of Mona’s freedom. Another woman who provides her with water is speaking to her parents as she declares her yearning to live like Mona. She complains while being served, “At times it is better not to eat. I’d like to be free.” In each case, women are grounded and are not afforded the same mobility as males, who are free to do what they want without consequence. Yolande constantly serves her partner, who often takes her money and plans heists for instance. Mona however, walks in the domain of men and faces severe consequences for doing so. Men that Mona encounters constantly desire to exchange their favours for sex. Mona at one point is even raped by a man in the forest, ending in a dolly shot that again concludes by pulling them away from the frame, as if relieving the man of punishment or guilt. This patriarchal disparity in each case is very evident in the dynamics presented. Man gets away with crime and misdemeanour, while as we see with Mona in the beginning and conclusion of the film, women who are as liberated are met with their untimely demise.
Bibliography
Fabe, M. (2014) Italian Neorealism: Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief. In: Closely Watched Films. Berkeley, University of California Press. pp. 99–119. doi:10.1525/9780520937291-009.
Kovács, A. B. (2008) An Alternative to the Classical Form: Neorealism an Modernism.Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-1980. University of Chicago Press. pp. 217-237. http://ebookcentral.com/lib/ual/detsil.action?docID-408453.
Kovács, A. B. (2008) Critical Reflexivity or the Birth of the Auteur. Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-1980. University of Chicago Press. pp. 253-271. http:// ebookcentral.com/lib/ual/detsil.action?docID-408453.
Neupert, R. J. (2007) A History of the French New Wave Cinema. University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 3-44. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=3444956.
Peixoto, M. (2019). The Festival That Celebrates the Arrival of Spring with Violence, Dirt and Booze. Vice. Weblog. https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjqag3/the-festival-that- celebrates-the-arrival-of-spring-with-violence-dirt-and-booze [Accessed 29th November 2022].
Shiel, M. (2006). Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City. Columbia University Press. pp. 1-16.
Tomasulo, F. P. (1982). “Bicycle Thieves”: A Re-Reading. Cinema Journal. 21(2), 2–13. https:// doi.org/10.2307/1225033.
Vagabond. (1985) [Film] Directed by: Agnes Varda. France, MK2 Diffusion.