Vagabond · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The first thing Varda shows you is the end. A young woman's body in a ditch, frozen, at the edge of a Languedoc vineyard in winter. Someone finds her, the police note it down, she is carried away. The outcome is spent before the film has started.

Which leaves nothing for suspense to do. The two hours that follow have to run on something else, and this is where Deleuze earns his place at the screening. He gives a precise name to what Varda removed.

In most films a character takes in a situation, the pressure builds, and they act in a way that changes it. Deleuze called this the movement-image: perception runs into action, action resolves the situation, and the cutting exists to keep that chain unbroken. Mona never stops acting. She walks, hitches rides, takes odd work and abandons it, sleeps wherever somebody will let her. Not one of these acts moves her situation by a degree. Deleuze had a word for this kind of motion, borrowed from the postwar cinema that first produced it: the balade, the trip or the stroll that transforms nothing. The route is real. The arc is missing.

The name pays for itself at once, because it heads off the question the film spends two hours declining to answer. Why doesn't she wash, take the job, go home, say yes to somebody? If you are watching for the movement-image you keep waiting for the turn that will organize everything behind it. It never comes. Stop waiting and the real subject walks into view: a woman moving through the countryside with the plot pulled out from under her, and everybody she passes rushing to supply a new one.

They supply it out loud, to the camera. A goatherd with a philosophy degree who chose the land. A scientist studying the disease killing the region's plane trees. Vineyard workers. Housewives who envy Mona her freedom and are frightened by it in the same breath. Each one turns and testifies, and the testimonies do not add up. Deleuze called this fabulation, or legending: people caught in the act of making a story, usually one that props up the teller rather than describing the person they claim to describe. The housewife who calls Mona free is describing a hole in her own kitchen. And because none of the accounts is disqualified by the others, you get what Deleuze called falsifying narration, versions that cannot all be true offered as equally true, used as the film's method of construction and not as a puzzle for you to solve. Nothing about Mona is being withheld. The film is showing you that the thing the inquest wants does not exist in the form the inquest assumes.

Varda knew whose armature she was borrowing. Citizen Kane built a dead man out of the contradictory memories of the people who outlived him. Rashomon put its witnesses face-on to the lens and let their versions stay incompatible. Kane at least ends with the sled. Varda keeps the structure and takes away the answer, and she can do it because of a contract audiences have never quite renounced: a real face, in real light, speaking to the camera, feels like evidence. She had been braiding documentary and fiction since La Pointe Courte in 1955, thirty years of knowing that contract from the inside. Here she borrows its authority and lets it come up empty. Every witness is credible. Together they produce a hole in the shape of a girl.

Meanwhile there is the body, and the body is not lying. That is the inheritance from Bicycle Thieves, the neorealist bargain Bazin argued for: real places, real weather, hardship filmed without the consolation of an uplift. It is also the inheritance from Bresson, whose Mouchette and Balthazar move a near-silent creature through a chain of indifferent hands toward a cold death nobody redeems. Sandrine Bonnaire, still a teenager, gives a performance with no bid for sympathy anywhere in it and no interiority on offer. What is left is posture. How Mona sleeps, how she eats, how she stands in a stranger's kitchen. Deleuze called this a cinema of the body: when psychology is withheld, attitude carries the time. Her dirt does more work than any monologue could. Each person who takes her in meets that filth and discovers the exact limit of their own generosity, which is what Deleuze meant by the gest, a posture that makes a social relation visible instead of stating it.

Under all of it runs Varda's own hidden architecture. A series of tracking shots, all moving right to left, against the direction we read. Each one ends on some object at the roadside, and the next quietly begins from it. That is not continuity. The shots are joined across a gap by a relay of things, a linkage that belongs to the film rather than to the character, closer to what Deleuze called the interstice: the cut as an AND rather than a because. It gives the drift a structure Mona cannot feel, laid over landscapes that have stopped being settings for anything, bare vines and verges and ditches where no action is available. Deleuze's term for those is any-space-whatever, and the film is full of them without ever making them pretty. The slope runs one way only. She is a little colder, a little dirtier, a little further from anyone each time the camera passes, and the first shot has already told you where the slope ends.

What this did to narrative was to prove that a film can take a protagonist as its entire subject and refuse to know her. Portraiture works in negative space. A death announced in the first minute turns a story into an inquiry, and an inquiry is free to fail. What it seeded is a way of making portrait films that do not have to solve their subject, and a licence for fiction to wear documentary's clothes without borrowing its certainty, the weave Varda began in 1955 and kept working for the rest of her life.

Watch it again for the trackings. Count them. Notice that the camera leaves her every time and settles on something at the roadside instead. Then sit with the question Varda opens and answers for nobody: whether Mona got what she wanted.