Vagabond

Vagabond (Agnes Varda, 1985)

Being left out in the cold is the role of a vagabond, a transient, a bum. It is not the role, however, of a viewer or critic, which is exactly what Vagabond does both unintentionally, and yet with total intention at the same time. It is fitting that both the title Vagabond as well as the release title in France, Sans toit ni loi (meaning "without roof or law") immediately conjure the distinct image of a despotic transient, trapped in an existence where the rules neither apply nor provide any order to the unforgiving world around said individual.

Agnes Varda seems to be working without any set of cinematic or conceptual laws at all, regardless of whether these laws appear helpful or hindering. In her disorderliness, Varda sadly leaves her ideals and intentions neglectfully exposed to the harsh elements, with no roof to house her aesthetics or ideologies, providing nothing to protect them from the almost certain thunderstorm of criticism looming directly above this film. She has unfortunately refused to use any form of readable exposition or minimally translated revelation to move the elements along, however they are ordered, within her film. She appears to be striving in vain for a difficult form of artistry at the excessive risk of dismantling both her film's worth and understandability.

Vagabond slips hard onto its side while struggling so valiantly to strap on the boots of Robert Bresson and his removal of significant events in a narrative. Varda apparently believes her profundity can only blossom out of a dogged reliance on pure imagery and silent expressions to drive her artwork (which is a highly valid argument that I normally would jump to agree with.) However, her belief in the power of image gradually loses its efficacy through her mostly poor execution and redundancy of form. As more and more the film's progression crutches its content on a dissembled chronology meant to add the "wow-factor" to the content, the emptiness of this story leads, as the title implies, to no place of shelter.

Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) steadily tows the viewer in so many different visual directions that without Varda somehow cushioning this classical model of alternative narrative with any subtext, emotion, or even the slightest object of sympathy for the audience to identify with, one begins to wait impatiently for the film to end. Manipulating the temporal elements of the film usually spices up a bland piece of writing, but combining the cut and dry narrative with quasi-documentarian camera work and a disjunctive plot progression, after a point, becomes not only obnoxious and overdone, but it makes Varda seem flashy and condescending, a notion one never wants to project to a critical gathering.

Beautifully shot, Bonnaire at least provides, (as petty as this sounds), some form of eye candy. Also, the setting luckily does not always remain so aggravatingly static (the vineyards were nice) and therefore Varda nabs some points out of the visuals she hangs on to so hard. However, aside from what Bonnaire is able to irk out with her facial muscles every now and again, and a couple of nice choices in framing and shooting hour and location, Vagabond ultimately succeeded in making me feel cinematically homeless.

Maybe if the film's public defense was that the intention of the film was to actually displease the audience beyond the common problem of attention span, by literally creating the anger and dejection within the viewer of the common vagrant, I would have significantly more praise for Vagabond's structure and direction.

Instead, this film's meandering becomes more and more intolerable with each step. The accidental Hubris of the director wears the skin in one's heel like a bleeding blister, soon exhausting itself quite thoroughly to a point of sheer delirium in both its reception by the audience, as well as its actual production. A quaint, realist attempt at intellectual expanse, this piece tragically goes no deeper than the road it treads, ultimately collapsing only to freeze to death in the cruel, well traveled ditch of anti-chronology and failed insight.