Sans toit ni loi

sans toit ni loi ( without a roof nor rule) by Agnes Varda

Visual poetry in films is rarely sublime.Mostly its an interpretation that is fed to us either by the director of the film or some high-faultin critic who manages to see color in sepiated walls.The rare film that manages to transcend leaves you speechless with nothing to say as words fail to capture the essence , beauty and enigma of that film. All you can say is today I was blessed. Like a born again christian or a corpulent evangelist you wish to celebrate your new found faith with words , gestures , anything that says to the director of the film, you gave me a day of absolute completeness today and a film that will forever stay with me like unrequited love. That transcendental, evocative , sensitive , visually dazzling , transcendence is sans toit ni loi by agnes Varda. The film as has been pointed out is the cinematic equivalent of ulysses . Like James Joyce , varda lets rip a stream of consciousness that is disturbing , sincere and beautifully sublime.The protoganist is a young female drifter, a vagabond who is eternally free. She requires human contact only to fulfill her basic needs and her solitude is complete and absolute , accentuated by her complete disdain for authority or advise.The people she meets are all left with indelible memories of her.Those that pity her are later assailed by thier own infirmities. She refuses to blend or compromise and as one character says is perpetually withering.She dies alone and uncared for and she leaves absolutely no conventional emotional baggage behind.This isnt about a hippie , or a bum , or a dope addict or just a mentally unsound person. Its about a compassionate person who choses to abnegate all her social bonds and moral barriers and lives for nothing more than basic survival. She is the eternal soul that is freedom. Pure , absolute and totally decadent freedom.

What I admired the most about "Vagabond" is the objective, evenhanded approach of the director towards her "heroine". She neither praises nor condemns her chosen "lifestyle", she simply observes it - and she observes it so well that this feels like the work of someone who's had first-hand experiences with similar people and surroundings. To be perfectly honest, the film doesn't have much psychological (or sociological) depth, and it can get boring at times while you're watching it, but right after it's over, you know that you've seen a good movie. (***)

With an antagonizing protagonist who is as doomed as the plane trees in the film...this film could be seen as strictly nihilistic. I recently watched "SherryBaby" and strongly preferred this film which I watched a week prior, and yet I still find myself pondering Sandrine Bonnaire's portrayal of a woman who is stranded.

Indeed "No one makes it alone" could better be the tag line here, and Bonnaire's Mona goes on an odyssey that is nothing short of harrowing. Also trading heroin chic for (self-imposed?) homeless bleak pushed us into less charted filmic waters. Choosing an unknown for the title role was also a good call I suspect. The film is now older than it's lead actress was at the time.

So much of the film talks about how Mona stinks, perhaps smell-a-vision would have helped ;> Honestly her face is still too attractive, although wide and maybe manly in a way, that for me the sense of her scent didn't wash. That being said, her disaffection was on display so well, that you could see her as having a dirty soul. At nearly every chance of being likable she veers to the other direction, the one notable exception for me being her interaction with the "platonologne" (is that like octogenarian, don't know the French...the characters all had interesting descriptions in the credits)..

Additionally, from the English subtitles and snatches of French, I sense the dialog (should I say dialogue) in this was quite cutting and clever in parts.

While Mona lives without roof or law, while she may move without purpose or direction, she is more than a human tumbleweed. She does not live without leaving a trace...but the filmmaker keeps us intentionally distant from her, we are never allowed inside her mental tent. Thus our composite sketch of her is as complex and contradictory as the people she encounters. Not only does Mona live without control over her life, her death as well eludes her.

Viewers may find it less easy to escape.

Thurston Hunger 7/10

A Rave! Beautifully photographed by Patrick Blossier, every shot, every frame is a delightfully balanced composition of light, color, and framing.

What's more amazing still is how Varda can make such a depressing story so mesmerizing. It is a touching, enchanting story of a lost girl slowly sinking deeper and deeper into society's refuse pile. And even though from the first reel we know her fate, we have to see how it unfolds. I don't remember the last time I saw such a beautiful film. One for the film schools. A masterpiece of French neo-realism.

Perhaps Sandrine Bonnaire's "Mona" represents my greatest fear -- of being alone and broke. That is why she has remained with me for almost twenty years. Remembering the first time I met her is nostalgic to me. I walked the roads of rural France with her and liked her for not begging to be liked. Perhaps it was love more than like. Her journey made me tearful. I mourned the inevitability of her existence.

Such is Agnes Varda's talent that the movie affected me so deeply -- my favourite movie of hers, by the way. The landscapes are so vivid, the dead tree branches so bare yet so brittle in the harsh elements. The compositions possess a fixed, absolute nature that conveys a hopeless destiny. There is no offensive beauty in Mona's destitution, there is merely purity.

Because so few motion pictures resonate with this much intensity and feeling for me, I go through periods in which I feel like I'm wasting my life away seeing so many, but when I consider the alternative, Mona's choices suddenly feel real to me.

Extraordinary in every sense.

Make a gallant effort to see VAGABOND. It will touch you deeply and wake you from the slumber of indifference.