Retro Review by Michaela Thordarson
A world of unadulterated freedom can be difficult to conceptualize. In her 1985 film Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi), Agnès Varda actualizes the life of a woman who decides to live her life drifting on the road with no home or job. The film follows Mona, a former secretary who becomes fed up with everyday life. The film proceeds with tales from those she interacts with during the days leading up to her death. Many of those that she interacts with saw her as a fiend for all the cigarettes, food, music, and other things she would ask people for. Others saw her as a free spirit who knew what she wanted in life and was content with herself as a person.
Other characters’ perception of Mona is influenced by her tattered clothes, a foul stench, and the fact that she carries around all of her belongings in a sack – but also assumptions the public had about women on the road in general, seeing them as beings just offering sexual favors in exchange for food and shelter. Only a few people in the film see Mona as a person and try to befriend her. Mona is a reserved woman when it comes to her past and where she came from. She is seen as a very attractive woman by a lot of men. She does not say much about where she is from, but lives a life far removed from when she was working in an office. The viewer may wonder more about her deep past and where she came from originally, but they receive no further clarity.
The film starts out with Mona laying dead in a field, but quickly shifts perspectives and becomes narrated by an outside voice that begins reflecting on the drifter’s life, who reveals her name, which most of the people she interacted with did not know. Her death is the beginning of her remembrance, showing the significance of Mona’s life in the lives of the people she crossed paths with.
The film follows her last winter in the South of France. The first shot of Mona alive shows her naked and swimming in the ocean. Two sleazy guys at a shop spy on Mona and question why she was swimming during the winter. Along the same lines, many people she interacts with throughout the film question her camping in the winter. Mona’s moral view is that camping during the winter means that it will be more quiet and open for her, concealing the fact that it is miserable not to have a home during a cold winter. These interactions and judgements imply to the audience that she is an independent and carefree woman. However, this independence is not completely attained because society does not allow her to gain it. She has nowhere to sleep without being a nuisance to the public, gets repetitively harassed and used, and has to beg for food or money. Mona still calls herself free, which seems delusional.
Leading up to her seeking more help for shelter, she gets admired by a few people. Mona is seen staying with another male drifter in a stately, old and abandoned home. As the two lovers roam around the luxurious residence, they indulge in each other's romantic company, while smoking, listening to music, and eating canned foods by a fire. Yolande, a woman dating one of the guys who wanted a naked Mona on the beach, sees Mona in these throws of love and admires her from a distance. Sometime after seeing Mona with this man, Yolande’s man, Paulo, robs the place and Mona is left without a home again. The way Yolande fantasies about Mona’s carefree way of living shows a skewed outlook on the bleak life Mona actually lives.
The viewer in the film gets the impression that Mona’s life is one of constant struggle. The film offers a wide assortment of sweeping shots as Mona is living her daily life. The camera likes to pan over and spot her sitting in a gutter, walking through alleys, and panhandling while being accompanied by dramatic orchestrated music. The beginning of the film affirms that Mona’s fate is impending, which creates a sense in the viewer that any proceeding act in the film could be the death of Mona.
Almost halfway into the film, Mona finds herself seeking shelter and gets a lead for a place to stay. She takes shelter with a retired philosopher on a farm. The interactions that follow this scene questions how Mona lives her life because of all the discrepancies it forges with her own world view of living freely. The philosopher and her get into a debate about how she is living her life, which the philosopher says is bound to end her. He says he knew many people that lived the way that she does now and that they are all dead. During this conversation, Mona admits that she wishes she could just have land and grow potatoes and be able to live life around that. The philosopher pursues this aspiration by giving her a plot of land. Instead of making use of this, a dream she had given herself and had no drive to make a reality, she steals cheese from the family and never touches the land. Mona is truly aimless. She does not want to improve her life by doing hard labor and would prefer a simpler way to do so. This makes it troublesome for the viewer who may find Mona difficult to sympathize with.
This aimlessness contradicts itself during a later sequence in which she spends time with a college professor, a woman whose goals and ambitions are completely opposite of Mona’s. The professor, Mrs. Landier, spoils her and does not pry at Mona to change her way of life but merely observes it. Eventually, Mrs. Landier does not find it suitable for Mona to stay in her car and takes her to the woods to camp. Later, regretting that decision, Mrs. Landier tells her assistant to go find Mona. She states that the woods are not safe for women; then proceeds a scene of Mona getting sexually assaulted by a man in the woods. Seeing the amount of times she got harassed does not amount to the many other instances of abuse she must have faced in her time on the streets. Getting sexually abused seemed like such a common occurrence to Mona, and feeds into her stone cold demeanor throughout the film as she interacts with men.
After being abandoned and assaulted, Mona is found helping a man named Assoun do landscaping work at a vineyard. He becomes fond of Mona and harbors a crush. This feeling of attraction developed while Assoun let Mona take refuge in his shared quarters when the rest of the field workers were temporarily gone. Once they return, they start to discover the relationship just before Mona pitifully runs away again. This leads Mona back to the streets and hitchhiking for a ride. An eager Yolande spots Mona on the road. She breaks her car and lets Mona into her home. She confesses that she has been admiring her ever since she saw her with that lover in the big empty house. Mona knows that Yolande’s kindness from her words and actions is no different than all the other strangers that she encounters. Her actions and words mean nothing to Mona because she has been wronged by strangers too many times and just sees Yolande as another opportunity to take advantage of.
With this budding relationship being the possible way out for Mona’s life of hardship, she quickly deflects this from happening by getting drunk with the owner of the house that Yolande is the maid for. She has once again abused somebody’s trust out of her own selfish behaviors from wanting some sort of muse out of the matter. It can be inferred that Mona does not care about the outcome of her actions because she thinks about what she wants in the current moment. Having this kind of mindset became toxic in her case, because it causes her to not think rationally about how she cooperates and behaves around others. This reciprocal action accompanies a newfound worry in Yolande about seeing Mona in public, fearful of seeing her because she is now scared of her. This creates another assumption that drifters are unsafe because they seem troubled.
Surrounding the last waking hours of Mona’s life are moments of despair; the day before her death seems like a fever dream. Taking sanctuary in a bustling train station, she befriends the others that inhabit the grounds there. She gets drunk with the other drifters in the station and stumbles around there, scaring pedestrians. Mrs. Landier’s assistance finds her causing a commotion and informs her of Mona’s distressing presence. Shortly after pursuing some semblance of life with people in the train station, she finds herself running away again.
Her boots at this point in the film have been so beaten that the shaft of the boots were wrapped around her ankles. Stumbling from both the boots and her drunkenness, looking for whatever shelter she could find, Mona spends the night in a radish greenhouse. She says to herself that her mom would be disappointed seeing her asleep in a cold radish enclosure. She wakes up from a drunken slumber and is told to go into town for help. While in town, she sees few people on the street, and the few there seem to be running away from her. The eerie nature of the situation is from the “wine dreg” or “wine vat”, an event where men dressed like menacing grapes grab people and soak them in wine. This is what one of the witnesses from the beginning of the film alludes to after seeing her purple tinted dead body.
Having this event happen to Mona almost seems ironic; she was heavily intoxicated by wine just before it happened. The wine stained her skin and clothes, adding more intensity to her disheveled look. After being a victim in this wine ritual, Mona is where she was at at the start of the film. Signaling that her death was near. She is shown in her last moments shivering, fatigue, and pitiful. She trips over a pipe jutting over a hole in the field where her weakened body lays to die. The film brings no further conclusions on Mona’s life before her last winter alive. It ends with this empty sign of hope that this woman could not have been helped. She denies all help from others unless they are giving her material goods. Witnessing such hopelessness throughout the film makes the viewer want to see Monda turn her life around. Seeing her demise is expected, but heartbreaking.