Frozen in Motion: Drift and Denial in Varda’s Vagabond
By Tom Miller
A thumb. A single, grimy, human thumb, trembling with hope over French tarmac, was all it took to bring together decades of life experience, and extinguish two lives. Two men, raring to be brought to life in colour and movement, saw this outstretched hand, murky through the veil separating fiction from reality, and groaned. They groaned and resigned themselves to the fact that their day would never come. With muted protests and appeals to their creator’s greatest insecurities they plead. But they were stricken from the page and history would know nothing of their meanderings.
A foot lightly pressed the brake, and another hand flicked the indicator. As the tires crunched and the engine chugged towards the side of the road, she lowered her thumb and opened the passenger door. Perhaps at this point, Setina Arhab knew that her life had changed forever. Maybe she felt a pang of guilt at the fictional homicides she had just committed, or was merely mesmerised by her rescuer’s heavy lidded eyes, straight, thin mouth, and strong nose. Or more likely her kind smile and buoyant bowl-cut.
This single moment of acceptance was the catalyst needed for Agnes Varda to slot the final piece into her jigsaw, revealing its image - a beautiful film about just the opposite, denial.
The pieces were already in motion, but scattered. The news that young women were still dying of consumption in supposedly modern, supposedly civilised 1980s Europe sparked disgust and anger in Varda. In search of a better future, her fantasy turned to the past. Memories of decades ago, solo tramping through out-of-season holiday resorts in southern France armed with nothing but a camera were resurrected, and became the building blocks of her next idea.
Originally the path was to be trodden by three, two men and a woman. But whatever happened in the car that day between Agnes Varda and hitchhiker Setina Arhab, whatever conversation took place, made Varda strike out male character’s names from her draft. Inky black blood seeped across the page as she re-formed the scattered pieces into a new story. Mona’s story.
The story begins with the end; Mona lying dead on the cold ground. Her path to this tragic end is subsequently revealed to us through the testimonies of others. Mona is only granted the status of a fellow human through the lens of those she interacts with. We have no knowledge of her thoughts or actions when entirely alone and are left to judge for ourselves how truthful, bitter, fantastical these accounts may be. We are left to discern her character like panning for gold in the dirt. She is denied even a name, it being granted only by the omniscient narrator, Varda herself. This bears its own concession, with the director saying ‘I know little about her, but it seems to me she came from the sea.’
Mona floats into the town like frothing white scum atop the brown waves. She drifts with no purpose, no object, plan or goal. She laughs, she fucks, she abandons, she latches on.
This absolute lack of motivation unsettles both the viewer and Mona’s new acquaintances. As Andrea Kleine points out in the Paris review, even among the tradition of films depicting drifters and wanderers, Mona emerges as singular:
A man alone has a reason, and his isolation is therefore noble. In Manchester by the Sea, Casey Affleck’s character exiles himself as punishment for the accidental death of his children; Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas follows an amnesiac path trying to reunite his son with his mother, whose relationship he destroyed through abuse and neglect.
A male drifter is doing penance for something for which he was found innocent but for which he cannot forgive himself. A woman alone is crazy. That she is not a sex worker makes her crazier. She has no purpose and is serving no one’s needs. Something must have happened to her (as in Wendy and Lucy), or she must be the victim of something (Wanda), or she must be on a prescriptive journey of self-discovery with a discernible end and a scheduled return (Wild; Eat, Pray, Love).
Mona’s refusal to fit into any box at all leads to her continued denial by everyone she meets. Even the socialist philosophers living off the land welcome her into their home but force her to keep a certain schedule, work hard and ultimately sacrifice a portion of her freedom to the practical.
Similarities can be drawn between Mona and the figure of the flâneur. First envisioned by Charles Baudelaire in the 19th Century and expanded upon by marxist cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, a flâneur is a figure who performs the act of strolling, sauntering without a purpose, observing people, society and the city.
Cristopher Butler surmised that the flâneur’s aims were to derive the eternal from the transitory and to see the poetic in the historic. This act was able to turn Erlebnis - a shock induced anaesthesia brought about by overwhelming sensory bombardment of life in a modern city - into Erfahrung - a positive response characterised by mobility and unmediated experiences of the wealth of sights, sounds and smells the city has to offer.
The political potential in this figure is not defined by the expression of their acts, but the desire behind it. Undirected and motiveless subjects are antithetical to a modern capitalist environment.
While there may be similarities, Mona is denied full status as a flâneuse. Critics of Benjamin point to the gendered and class elements which are overlooked in the formulation of the flâneuse. Women and poorer members of 19th century cities did not have the same ability to wander safely and aimlessly as others.
In his Arcades Project, Benjamin states that the flâneur stands at the margins of the city in which he does not feel at home, seeking asylum in the crowd. The crowd is the veil from behind with the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned. This anonymity is denied to Mona, as she traverses a coastal resort town out of season. She is instantly identifiable by the locals as being out of place.
Virgina Woolf speaks of the importance of street haunting in preserving the character and history of our cities. To subvert the monetization and growing surveillance of the streets we need to both frequent them as familiar places and, like spectres, disturb them to make them seem unfamiliar. Mona haunts the streets of the town, disturbing the local’s routines and making them re-asses their place in the world.
Mona, then, is denied full status of a flâneuse, but takes its logic from the city streets to the coastal town, with varying results. Perhaps a better label for our protagonist is that of a ragpicker, another motif used by Benjamin. The ragpicker sifts through the detritus of daily life, having the potential to reach a certain freedom by juxtaposing things and ideas that are supposed to be incompatible. Mona is a ragpicker, collecting the cast-offs of the town to build her freedom around her.
Mona’s final denial comes in the penultimate scene, before we arrive back at her death. She stumbles across a seemingly deserted town. Dangerously ill, we wonder, and perhaps she does too, whether the eerie emptiness is a product of her deteriorating mind. Suddenly, from an alleyway some monstrous figures emerge. Clad in sacks stuffed with straw, top hats with goose feathers, and badger-skins shielding their faces they surround and attack Mona with rags drenched in thick wine sediment. They smear her body as she screams and retreats into a phonebox.
A vintage postcard from Cournonterral.
While initially seeming out of sync with the grounded tone of the rest of the film, this scene perfectly encapsulates Mona's journey. The ritual depicts the festival of Pailhasses, performed from 3pm - 5pm every Ash Wednesday in the French village of Cournonterral. This tradition is based on a dispute over firewood between neighbouring towns dating back to 1346. To this day it is reenacted every year, and the Pailhasses chase the ‘white men’ (dressed in everyday clothes) through the streets to douse them in baths of gloopy wine.
The residents see the festival as a free expression of chaos, destruction and sexual freedom. Is this not how Mona lives her life? The key difference is Mona carries this ethos into every second of her day and every day of her year. The town of Cournonterral has a clearly designated two hour period every year where they can transcend the routine of daily life, to get it out of their system, while remaining docile and obedient for the remainder of the year.
If the residents were to take a step back and answer which is more barbaric, an archaic tradition based on a dispute from nearly a thousand years ago, or a woman deciding to not work in an office, to not live under the same roof each night, or any roof at all, how would they answer?
The idea that certain norms are accepted no matter how ridiculous they are, while Mona’s are denied is shown throughout the film with each person she interacts with. But this final flourish is so effective in its juxtaposition as we see that Mona will be denied and rejected at all levels; from the personal to the historic and the cinematic.
Even the camera denies her. As Richard Skinner points out:
In Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda makes frequent use of tracking shots to follow Cléo along Parisian streets; there is a lot of the same kind of camerawork in Vagabond. But while the narcissistic Cléo is nearly always in the center of the frame, Mona can barely stay in the picture. As she walks along beaches, streets, fields she either walks into the frame of an already-in-motion tracking shot, or falls behind, or walks out of frame as the camera keeps moving. It’s as though she is on the periphery of her own movie.
Varda is the only one to grant Mona a name, but even she, almost impatient with the extent of her wandering, struggles to keep up with the freedom of her movements.
The original French title of the film is Sans toit ni loi, meaning ‘With neither Shelter nor Law’. With this Varda affirms Mona’s status with a negative. It is what she doesn’t have which forms her identity. This is reminiscent of the French revolutionary figures of Sans Culottes, meaning ‘without breeches’. The term "sans-culottes" refers to the common people who wore long trousers (pantalon) instead of the silk breeches (culotte) worn by the upper classes and the group became a significant force in the French revolution.
Two monikers, two hundred years apart, defined their subjects through a specific absence. To complete our lacking-Franco-triumvarite we must turn to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Lacan outlines that our ego is formed during the preverbal, imaginary mirror stage when the child sees its flawless specular image (either in a mirror or mother’s eyes) and misrecognizes this coherent, non-fragmented image as itself. The ego becomes relentlessly driven to restore this impossible image of utopian wholeness. Thus, there begins a never-ending quest for ‘the Thing’ that offers the (impossible) promise of completion and harmony.
In other words, each of us seeks to fill our own lack. Mona however, seems to have embraced her lack, alienating and disturbing those she comes into contact with. Her lack of desire to fill her own void suggests to those around her that she has no void, prompting resentment and denial. For if they were to accept this as truth, they would need to look inward at their own void, at the swirling blinding darkness. The thought of which is too much.
If they have to struggle with their own lack, why shouldn’t she?
