The Filmhouse's season on French director Agnes Varda featured a particularly haunting moody film I had last seen 20 years before on Channel 4. Conversion to big screen intensity gave a terrific edge to that shaky feeling when you relive in full a distant memory. Vagabonde (also billed as Sans Toit Ni Loi, without roof or law) is about a young woman fleeing from all bonds with the society around her, and the emotional impact she makes before and by her death in a farm ditch. Compare watching it when the film was new and the story felt recent, to revisiting it now after so long, when the perspective is now even more moving, that the world has moved on without this character who it gave no place to and is oblivious to the dimmed trace that she ever lived. Just like life has been for how many millions of real folks who deserved better?
As nothing much has shifted in economic life, the story has not lost its contemporariness, save for the thought that it is about someone who lived before blogs. We are not told how serious is what Mona has run away from, only that she has chosen this aimless rural wandering, with just a backpack and a tent as possessions, over being a shorthand secretary. That is what makes her enigmatic, to the film characters she encounters. Can we who are not making the same choice, make sense of it? and of what our answer says about freedom and society? Mona finds nothing of value that lasts, in her journey, yet there are any number of reasons why she may be right to have fled from oppressive life options, that even knowing her fate we can't say she should have stuck with them.
She liberates for a moment a housebound old lady who is stuck having games of family respectability played around her. They get drunk together. But as for when chances arise for Mona to attach her life to those of any of the folks she meets, the practical questions never work out, and the moment is always lost. We are all drifting around in collision and clash and rivalry and trickery, when you find yourself with no niche amid those negative forces it becomes this impossible to create one yet guard your freedom too. There is a parallel with what happens to refugees.
Even the "counterculture" lets her down, but viewers with harsher down to earth minds might see it as her letting it down. A green philosopher-farmer takes her in and gives her some land, then throws her back out for failing to put the work into it, and calls her hut dirty too. So bloody what, how dare he, it's her own room? and the work is new to her, she needs room to find her pace. While preening his ego with the delusion that he was offering Mona help, he was power-tripping, insulting her, doing her emotional hurt and feeling good about himself at her expense.
This is an all too common pattern: autocratic help. It may epitomise how the counterculture failed, the same way as school and communism and Victorian parenting and psychiatry and the World Bank fail. The giver of help must force the results, loses the faculty of wanting to see that results might be a harder to attain than instantly, brings in ideals of their own to push onto the helped person, becomes a tyrant, takes away their freedom, their own being. It actually ruins the chance of attaining a practical success, it destroys. It's playing God: "I cast you out, a fugitive and a vagabond shall you be." My sympathies are totally with Mona in storming away from him feeling cheated. It sums up the world's failing of her and of millions of folks through history who it has given no niche of viable free life to. THEY ARE THE MARTYRS. Vagabonde lives this failiure of the world at its most intense, when suffered not from the state but from the nature of real people. It deeply offends fairness, that in his high handed sneer the jerk predicts Mona's fate correctly, but that his own treatment of her helps to cause it. How often does that happen? "Yah boo, you'll end up in some stigmatised lowlife state unless you live exactly as I say." It has been said too many times to children by adult controlling egos, and in mental health work.
Mona fits that emotionally egalitarian theme in the Old Testament, of unlikely figures getting called to a task sometimes beyond their own awareness - for perhaps she does achieve a purpose, just by bearing witness to her choice, helping the folks she meets to judge their own life choices with a deeper insight re fairness and ties. They recognise the dilemma just as the viewer does. At the level of practical comforts we who are not living like her may feel lucky for it, yet she is lucky not to be tied down as we often are, to fight prolonged life issues and quarrels. That may be what matters most to her, she may have good cause to feel lucky she has escaped that. It's swings and roundabouts, it is never assumable what is lucky or not in anyone's life.
Yet it seems a clear issue of luck that your martyrdom might happen at the wrong time. It is distressing to have to think and remember the likelihood that there have been unrecognised aspies of my age who got into states of collision with society that led to endings like Mona's in the film's era, which was in the dark ages before aspies emerged, and meant missing out on being in the scene now and all it means for scoring against past wrongs.
Those of us who have made a defining escape at some time in our life, but without it placing us on the streets, are very personally impacted by this question. Like my escape from my teachers, in the same year as Vagabonde was made, 1985: itself also haunting to look back at! I have the anti-school issue in my life, as an emotionally vital prolonged cause, I want the means to pursue it all the way, so I feel lucky that in a sedentary life I have the means. Mona might instead feel lucky not to have any such prolonged issue in her life, or emotional tie to its pursuit. Even when she dies in the ditch she may be relieved she has been sucessful in avoiding the burden of having a prolonged issue to cope with, which would have restricted her choice to march away from her unhappy working life. Maybe if she had been restricted by the emotional importance of other life issues already in progress, she would still just have strongly needed to escape. The threshold might or might not be higher, for we don't know what she escaped from.
Certainly if my escape from my teachers had resulted in a life and fate like Mona's, it would have been every bit as vital a matter of survival, still a million times worth doing. I affirm that from watching Vagabonde. Yet my avoidance of that fate also really matters. Since my first watching, at a hard economic time when my escape was still fairly recent and life not much rebuilt at all, time has let me advance it to a far more complete distance from everything about my teachers and make it clear to all, with successive acts of writing against their ideas. Time, like this, is exactly what Mona's path did not give her. Neither may it be what she needed, and you never want the stress for relying on it when it is still future, but without it, no chance for good surprises like the aspie scene's creation, to come along in your future. Another unsolvable dilemma there. It puts my escape experience, and anyone's, into this context of 2 alternative paths: the effort of long term struggle or the finality of quick martyrdom. Circumstances don't always give us the choice between them, they may lead us to one or the other, and that has to be the weight off our consciences at the hour of our death.
You see that when Mona is lying in the ditch in exhausted tears. Life eventually is just that. Not a place where anything good can be relied on. It is tempting to credit that scene as the meaning of life. Mona dies of living on her own terms, true to herself. Snooty respectable viewers will pounce to judgment against that, yet it is a far better fate than dying in a war for a state that rates ordinary lives expendable, or of an industrial disease after being a good worker who never went on strike, or by violence in a place where you chose to remain, or full of psychiatric drugs. It encapsulates the grounds for a gnostic disgust at this life. If we find ourselves with a better chance than Mona of extending our lives' duration, what does that mean, when it the chance aspect of it is so unfair? Life only has meaning when lived in a state of struggle against all its unfair aspects. Purpose lies in being identified personally with the struggle and with what you stand for, so that it becomes what you are remembered for, by as much of the world after your time as remembers you at all.
If Vagabonde is haunting because of this, then also because any aspie viewer can identify with any figure drifting on the margins, observing society critically and fearfully from the outside, not managing to connect lastingly with it. Mona is certainly not autistic, she is too easily able to hitch-hike and to ask for favours like refills of her water bottle, for that. But here is the amazing twist -not in the story but in real life. The actress who plays Mona is Sandrine Bonnaire, who has an autistic sister and much more recently made the angry documentary film Her Name Is Sabine, which we also saw at the Filmhouse as an Elas party, about how the mental health system drugged her and made her condition worse. Might this biological link to autism have enhanced her acting ability to portray outsidership and engimatic distance? It means looking at Vagabonde now in the eerie light of remembering having no idea of this, no knowledge yet of aspies or of being one, at the time of originally seeing it and feeling such a strong impact.
Maurice Frank
As nothing much has shifted in economic life, the story has not lost its contemporariness, save for the thought that it is about someone who lived before blogs. We are not told how serious is what Mona has run away from, only that she has chosen this aimless rural wandering, with just a backpack and a tent as possessions, over being a shorthand secretary. That is what makes her enigmatic, to the film characters she encounters. Can we who are not making the same choice, make sense of it? and of what our answer says about freedom and society? Mona finds nothing of value that lasts, in her journey, yet there are any number of reasons why she may be right to have fled from oppressive life options, that even knowing her fate we can't say she should have stuck with them.
She liberates for a moment a housebound old lady who is stuck having games of family respectability played around her. They get drunk together. But as for when chances arise for Mona to attach her life to those of any of the folks she meets, the practical questions never work out, and the moment is always lost. We are all drifting around in collision and clash and rivalry and trickery, when you find yourself with no niche amid those negative forces it becomes this impossible to create one yet guard your freedom too. There is a parallel with what happens to refugees.
Even the "counterculture" lets her down, but viewers with harsher down to earth minds might see it as her letting it down. A green philosopher-farmer takes her in and gives her some land, then throws her back out for failing to put the work into it, and calls her hut dirty too. So bloody what, how dare he, it's her own room? and the work is new to her, she needs room to find her pace. While preening his ego with the delusion that he was offering Mona help, he was power-tripping, insulting her, doing her emotional hurt and feeling good about himself at her expense.
This is an all too common pattern: autocratic help. It may epitomise how the counterculture failed, the same way as school and communism and Victorian parenting and psychiatry and the World Bank fail. The giver of help must force the results, loses the faculty of wanting to see that results might be a harder to attain than instantly, brings in ideals of their own to push onto the helped person, becomes a tyrant, takes away their freedom, their own being. It actually ruins the chance of attaining a practical success, it destroys. It's playing God: "I cast you out, a fugitive and a vagabond shall you be." My sympathies are totally with Mona in storming away from him feeling cheated. It sums up the world's failing of her and of millions of folks through history who it has given no niche of viable free life to. THEY ARE THE MARTYRS. Vagabonde lives this failiure of the world at its most intense, when suffered not from the state but from the nature of real people. It deeply offends fairness, that in his high handed sneer the jerk predicts Mona's fate correctly, but that his own treatment of her helps to cause it. How often does that happen? "Yah boo, you'll end up in some stigmatised lowlife state unless you live exactly as I say." It has been said too many times to children by adult controlling egos, and in mental health work.
Mona fits that emotionally egalitarian theme in the Old Testament, of unlikely figures getting called to a task sometimes beyond their own awareness - for perhaps she does achieve a purpose, just by bearing witness to her choice, helping the folks she meets to judge their own life choices with a deeper insight re fairness and ties. They recognise the dilemma just as the viewer does. At the level of practical comforts we who are not living like her may feel lucky for it, yet she is lucky not to be tied down as we often are, to fight prolonged life issues and quarrels. That may be what matters most to her, she may have good cause to feel lucky she has escaped that. It's swings and roundabouts, it is never assumable what is lucky or not in anyone's life.
Yet it seems a clear issue of luck that your martyrdom might happen at the wrong time. It is distressing to have to think and remember the likelihood that there have been unrecognised aspies of my age who got into states of collision with society that led to endings like Mona's in the film's era, which was in the dark ages before aspies emerged, and meant missing out on being in the scene now and all it means for scoring against past wrongs.
Those of us who have made a defining escape at some time in our life, but without it placing us on the streets, are very personally impacted by this question. Like my escape from my teachers, in the same year as Vagabonde was made, 1985: itself also haunting to look back at! I have the anti-school issue in my life, as an emotionally vital prolonged cause, I want the means to pursue it all the way, so I feel lucky that in a sedentary life I have the means. Mona might instead feel lucky not to have any such prolonged issue in her life, or emotional tie to its pursuit. Even when she dies in the ditch she may be relieved she has been sucessful in avoiding the burden of having a prolonged issue to cope with, which would have restricted her choice to march away from her unhappy working life. Maybe if she had been restricted by the emotional importance of other life issues already in progress, she would still just have strongly needed to escape. The threshold might or might not be higher, for we don't know what she escaped from.
Certainly if my escape from my teachers had resulted in a life and fate like Mona's, it would have been every bit as vital a matter of survival, still a million times worth doing. I affirm that from watching Vagabonde. Yet my avoidance of that fate also really matters. Since my first watching, at a hard economic time when my escape was still fairly recent and life not much rebuilt at all, time has let me advance it to a far more complete distance from everything about my teachers and make it clear to all, with successive acts of writing against their ideas. Time, like this, is exactly what Mona's path did not give her. Neither may it be what she needed, and you never want the stress for relying on it when it is still future, but without it, no chance for good surprises like the aspie scene's creation, to come along in your future. Another unsolvable dilemma there. It puts my escape experience, and anyone's, into this context of 2 alternative paths: the effort of long term struggle or the finality of quick martyrdom. Circumstances don't always give us the choice between them, they may lead us to one or the other, and that has to be the weight off our consciences at the hour of our death.
You see that when Mona is lying in the ditch in exhausted tears. Life eventually is just that. Not a place where anything good can be relied on. It is tempting to credit that scene as the meaning of life. Mona dies of living on her own terms, true to herself. Snooty respectable viewers will pounce to judgment against that, yet it is a far better fate than dying in a war for a state that rates ordinary lives expendable, or of an industrial disease after being a good worker who never went on strike, or by violence in a place where you chose to remain, or full of psychiatric drugs. It encapsulates the grounds for a gnostic disgust at this life. If we find ourselves with a better chance than Mona of extending our lives' duration, what does that mean, when it the chance aspect of it is so unfair? Life only has meaning when lived in a state of struggle against all its unfair aspects. Purpose lies in being identified personally with the struggle and with what you stand for, so that it becomes what you are remembered for, by as much of the world after your time as remembers you at all.
If Vagabonde is haunting because of this, then also because any aspie viewer can identify with any figure drifting on the margins, observing society critically and fearfully from the outside, not managing to connect lastingly with it. Mona is certainly not autistic, she is too easily able to hitch-hike and to ask for favours like refills of her water bottle, for that. But here is the amazing twist -not in the story but in real life. The actress who plays Mona is Sandrine Bonnaire, who has an autistic sister and much more recently made the angry documentary film Her Name Is Sabine, which we also saw at the Filmhouse as an Elas party, about how the mental health system drugged her and made her condition worse. Might this biological link to autism have enhanced her acting ability to portray outsidership and engimatic distance? It means looking at Vagabonde now in the eerie light of remembering having no idea of this, no knowledge yet of aspies or of being one, at the time of originally seeing it and feeling such a strong impact.
Maurice Frank
