Vagabond

Directed by Agnes Varda

At the Copley Place Cinema

One cool artsy line-and-shadow shot after another flashes on the screen. Wheatfields stretch into the distance, crooked fences reflect sunlit weeds, the world becomes one large poetic image as French director Agnes Varda transforms one girl's story into a supposedly universal metaphor; life is an aimless wander, meeting people and passing through places until you die. And, believe it or not, the film's beautiful cinematography and Saundrine Bonnaire's quiet naturalness as the girl actually make this work.

Vagabond opens with the discovery of an unknown girl, frozen in a ditch by the side of the road. The film's action (this is definitely a film, not a movie) retraces the path that led this girl, Mona, to her death.

When we first meet Mona, she's a teen rebel, smoking cigarettes and yelling at people when she doesn't like them. She's running away from something, we don't know what, but we expect to. But we never find out. The film turns out to be not about Mona the girl, but about Mona the symbol. In her wanderings, she encounters different people representing different philosophical outlooks, and her passing through their lives changes them. Interviews with the people who have met or seen Mona are spliced in throughout the action, supposedly to prove that Mona has left her mark in people's lives.

She meets a goatherd who once majored in philosophy. Yes, this is a cliche. But the humanness of the tall, thin man with wire-rimmed glasses and goatskin clothing, living the simple life with his wife and son, affects you anyway. He tells Mona she is doing nothing but "withering," and offers her a piece of land to care for and give her life meaning. At first she is enthusiastic, thinking she may want to settle down, but soon, she drifts on.

Soon after, she meets a woman professor who studies plane-tree disease. This woman tells Mona that one "must do something to stop the plague." Mona brushes off this piece of quasi-philosophy too, but the woman develops a strange obsession with the girl and the freedom that she comes to represent.

Many people, trapped by various aspects of society--including the professor, the goatherd, and a ridiculous grass-smoking stereotype who wears a heavy locked chain around his neck, and says mysteriously, "I threw away the key"-- feel this strange attraction to Mona, and the viewer comes to feel it also. One doesn't quite identify with Mona, because she isn't really a personality, but one does identify with her driving force, the power that keeps her drifting, keeps her moving past opportunities to settle down, or jobs or love affairs.

The film is filled with heavyhanded symbols of societal oppression and the universal urge to free oneself from convention, and the director's major problem is that she cannot quite decide whether Mona is a person or a symbol. The fact that we learn nearly nothing about her personal history and that she rarely speaks or thinks would indicate that she is a metaphor, not an individual. But occasionally, Varda strays from her reservedly elegant direction and portrays Mona in human-dilemma situations. These are often very moving in themselves. For example, just as Mona begins to develop a believable emotional relationship with a man, his friends return and make her leave.

It is the inconsistency of the film, not the weakness of specific moments, that detract from its effectiveness. At the end of the film, Varda suddenly and incongruously makes us feel sad when we watch Mona sicken, cry and freeze. One could try to explain away this sadness as a more universal quality than just sympathy for a pathetic girl. Maybe what you feel is regret at man's mortality and realization of the unavoidable limits of freedom, but this is pushing it.

Vagabond is powerful primarily because of its atmosphere--the way it turns bleak, open stretches of landscape into symbols of freedom, and thus manages to turn a young girl's random travels into a symbolic human odyssey. Until the end, you feel the movie is as much about the people she's met as about Mona herself, with a little about humanity in general thrown in. Mona's death scene at the end of the film completely destroys the subtle mood it has worked so hard to create, but regardless of the disappointing end, the fascinated detachment with which you watch this film is different and more powerful than most movie-watching experiences, and should not be missed.