Books, Arts & Manners: Ends and Beginnings

Once again the Europeans are ahead of us. Even if Agnès Varda’s Vagabond does not measure up to the masterpieces of the cinema, compared to what is around these days, it is at least an attempt to deal with a serious subject in an adult manner. Called in France Sans Toit ni loi (Without Roof or Law), it is the story of an 18-year-old drifter, Mona, found frozen to death in a ditch near Nîmes during an unusually cold winter in the south of France. Well, not so much her story as a pseudo-documentary of the last months of her life, told partly from her point of view and partly from the vantage points of the people she came in contact with. The film begins and ends with her corpse; in between, it tells us a good deal, though not quite enough.

Mona, whose motto is “Alone is good,” has left her office work and despised petit-bourgeois parents in order to wander around the roads of Provence, occasionally doing odd jobs, or sponging and chiseling as best she can. She is not unattractive, and sometimes offers sex in exchange for creature comforts; all she needs is food, cigarettes, a place to sleep, and, if possible, her bit of pot. Sometimes she abuses people, sometimes she is abused, even raped; but, unsentimental almost to the point of stolidity, she is pleased enough with her mangy existence, her few belongings and fewer baths. When people are good to her, she may be as nice to them as her basic indolence allows, but without really opening up; when they are not (and sometimes even when they are), she can be pretty beastly, too.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

Once again the Europeans are ahead of us. Even if Agnès Varda’s Vagabond does not measure up to the masterpieces of the cinema, compared to what is around these days, it is at least an attempt to deal with a serious subject in an adult manner. Called in France Sans Toit ni loi (Without Roof or Law), it is the story of an 18-year-old drifter, Mona, found frozen to death in a ditch near Nîmes during an unusually cold winter in the south of France. Well, not so much her story as a pseudo-documentary of the last months of her life, told partly from her point of view and partly from the vantage points of the people she came in contact with. The film begins and ends with her corpse; in between, it tells us a good deal, though not quite enough.

Mona, whose motto is “Alone is good,” has left her office work and despised petit-bourgeois parents in order to wander around the roads of Provence, occasionally doing odd jobs, or sponging and chiseling as best she can. She is not unattractive, and sometimes offers sex in exchange for creature comforts; all she needs is food, cigarettes, a place to sleep, and, if possible, her bit of pot. Sometimes she abuses people, sometimes she is abused, even raped; but, unsentimental almost to the point of stolidity, she is pleased enough with her mangy existence, her few belongings and fewer baths. When people are good to her, she may be as nice to them as her basic indolence allows, but without really opening up; when they are not (and sometimes even when they are), she can be pretty beastly, too.