Four Ways of Looking at Agnès Varda

Vagabond is a portrait of a young woman’s life in reverse, starting from the moment she is found dead, frozen in a ditch. You could say that it’s like watching a person in a rearview mirror, which feels fitting for the story of Mona (played by a sixteen-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire), who hitchhikes—stopping and starting, staying and leaving—through the wintry countryside of Montpellier. It’s been thirty years since the first time I saw Vagabond. Watching it now, for the second time, was such a startling experience. Not only was I seeing the film again, I was also seeing my own self just as vividly as a young woman in a rearview mirror.

The first time I saw Vagabond was in 1989. I had just moved to Paris with the hope of applying to La Fémis, the national film school of France. I had never heard of Agnès Varda. I hadn’t heard of too many women film directors at all, in fact. So I was very excited by the prospect of seeing Vagabond, which I had heard great things about. 

I hated it. 

I was so disappointed that the rare woman “given a chance” to make a film would do something so boring and repellant.

As I watched Vagabond this second time, I kept seeing flashes of my younger self who thought those things. This time I loved the movie. Instead of imagining that someone “let” Varda make this film, I felt it was clear that she made Vagabond completely on her own terms and with profound purpose. I marvel at every aspect of the film, from the way it is shot to the economy and confidence with which it brazenly weaves what is documentary and what is fiction. How distressing that I believed myself to be “bored and repelled” that first time I saw it. Now I can only think about how heavily defended I must have been to wall myself off from such a remarkable movie. The world it so incisively portrays was unfamiliar and threatening to me then. The kindred connections between the destinies of marginalized people, despite their differences, which are depicted in the film with such generosity, were something I was not yet prepared to acknowledge as a young woman. It seems that I didn’t want to think of myself as part of the club. That happens to young people fortunate enough to not have experienced the violence directed at women yet. It takes a while for us to realize it. Varda sees the world of Vagabond through the eyes of many people. She shows us men who look at women and women who know they are being looked at. But Varda throws no person under the bus. As much as the film is a portrayal of Mona seen through the many eyes of the people she encounters, it’s also a film about memory and images and aging and society and nature. Which is part of why it is so electric to rewatch. It not only commands my attention, it simultaneously activates my own memories of seeing it the first time. Furthermore, it provokes me anew to consider how we as humans must navigate the distance between how we may be seen and who we are inside.

I realize now how much my younger self didn’t want to know what the film was revealing. I didn’t want to know how systemic misogyny was. I hated having it held up to me that a young person alone on the road was at risk of being raped. I remember so vividly how upset I was by one of the early scenes, in which Mona is rude to a truck driver who picks her up. I was mad at her. Why couldn’t she be nice to him? I realize now how much I must have wanted to blame her behavior instead of imagining a world that could value her so little. I certainly didn’t want to imagine a world that would value me that little, and luckily for me (and primarily because of privilege) I hadn’t had to encounter it yet. What’s so remarkable to me now is that that same privilege rendered me incapable of seeing how Vagabond is a meditation on seeing and valuing what it is to be human, even and especially when we have nothing and are at our most vulnerable.

There is an unforgettable moment in the film in which a woman named Mme. Landier almost electrocutes herself. She has grasped onto the light fixtures in her bathroom and can’t let go as the shock shakes through her. The scene starts with the sound of the shaking glass, heard by a person in the other room. It’s a fantastic separation of sound from image, making each more mysterious and powerful. In the midst of her being electrocuted, when we finally realize what is making the sound, the image in and of itself is a shock, as if we the audience were in water and the electricity had just reached us.

As Mme. Landier recovers, she describes having seen violent fragments of images all out of order. We imagine she might have been seeing images of her own life flash before her, but she says that she was seeing her time with Mona, whom she picked up hitchhiking.

The first time we see Mme. Landier, she’s taking a luxurious bath, talking to someone on the phone about Mona. From her comfortable place in the warm water that looks like it smells good, the immaculately made-up Mme. Landier is incredulous and laughing as she describes what it was like to be in the car with the terrible stench coming off of Mona’s unwashed body.

The contrasts between the two women continue. Mme. Landier is an academic, an expert in a fungus that kills plane trees, and she explains to Mona as they drive through the countryside of Montpellier that this fungus arrived with American GIs when they left weapons in packing crates during World War II. The infection lasts years and will soon take over all the trees.

Mona asks, “Do you heal them?” and Mme. Landier says, “No, I study them.”

This is the distance between Mme. Landier and Mona. Mme. Landier can only study Mona—she can’t begin to imagine how she might help heal her or even simply drive her to safety, but perhaps most critically, she can’t relate to her. Class separates the women. Mme. Landier believes she has earned her own autonomy, not realizing yet that it has only been granted to her for a brief window of time and can be taken away at any moment. But Mona understands that her shot at freedom must be stolen at every moment—both from all of the people who believe she was born undeserving of it and the society that is unwilling to protect her from them.

One of the few times we see Mona’s body relax in the film is when she is in Mme. Landier’s car. Out of necessity, Mona has had to be on guard with almost everyone she’s met on the road. And finally with Mme. Landier, who is so curious about her but isn’t about to take anything from her like the many men along the way want to, Mona can relax and almost trust. She drinks champagne; she gets fed. But there’s a very powerful, terrible moment when Mme. Landier, during a stop on their journey, gets out of the car to speak with her young male colleague while Mona waits in the car for her. Mme. Landier tells him about the young hitchhiker she’s picked up and asks him if he wants to take a look at her, encouraging him to go peer through the car window at Mona. Mme. Landier is so much more allied with her young male colleague than she is with what it means to be vulnerable as a young drifter that it doesn’t occur to her that by sending him to gawk at Mona through the window she’s just burst the fragile and precious bubble of safety she’s momentarily created for Mona in her car. It’s all just a game to Mme. Landier, a funny story.

Throughout all of the scenes with Mme. Landier, she’s puzzled by her own feelings of discomfort that Mona’s presence stirs in her. She knows in her gut that she has a connection to this young woman but is simultaneously incapable of recognizing it. In the moment of her electrocution, she sees what she could not see before: that she was unable to see what was right in front of her—that her wish to see herself as different from Mona was a denial of the reality of marginalized experience. Looking at Vagabond now, I realize that when I was twenty-four I was relating to it the way Mme. Landier relates to Mona. In denial. Now I find myself, like Mme. Landier, experiencing fragments of images from my past moving like shock waves through me. But thanks to age and, once again, to Agnès Varda—who probably got through to me the first time in ways I have yet to understand—I can now see.