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The directors of the French New Wave are obsessed with
contradictions and unlikely combinations. Jean-Luc Godard's
career charts a trajectory from his "neo-realist musical"
Une Femme est une femme (1961) to the conflicts between
image and sound that typify his Dziga Vertov period to the
promiscuous mix of film and video in projects such as Numéro
deux (1975) and the Histoire(s) du cinéma series (1989-98).
Much of Alain Resnais' work straddles the distinction
between fiction and documentary; Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
combines newsreel footage of the aftermath of the Hiroshima
bombing with the fictional romance of two troubled
protagonists, while Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980) uses
made-up characters and scenarios to illustrate real-life
behavioral theories. And Chris Marker fuses ethnography,
self-reflexivity, fiction, and autobiography into what
Philip Lopate rightly considers remarkably cohesive and
erudite "essay films." It became clear to me while
watching the new Criterion Collection DVD releases of Cléo From 5 to 7
(1962) and Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1985) that Agnès
Varda is another nouvelle vague director interested in
exploring the contradictions between fiction and
documentary, between spectacle and narration.
Played with grace by Corinne Marchand, the Cléo of
Varda's 1962 film is a beautiful but somewhat shallow pop
singer nervously waiting for the results of a cancer test.
The film covers Cléo's life for two hours, from
(predictably) 5 to 7pm, but Varda compresses this time down
to 90 minutes. Cléo spends much of these two hours with the
important people in her life and career, including her
amanuensis Angèle (Dominique Davray), her callow boyfriend
José (José Luis de Villalonga) and her old friend Dorothée
(Dorothée Blank), but near the end of the film she wanders
the streets of Paris alone and is comforted by a kind
soldier (Antoine Bourseiller) preparing to return to
Algeria.
Cléo's story is very simple, but Varda introduces
digressions that pull us away from plot structure and into
moments of documentary and pure spectacle. Near the
beginning of the film, for instance, Cléo and Angèle have a
quick drink at a restaurant and shop for a hat. (Cléo From 5 to 7 has
been justly praised for its artful framing and camera work,
and the scene in the hat store, with its plethora of
mirrors and the von Sternbergian mise-en-scene clutter of
dozens of hats on display, is the film's stylistic
tour-de-force.) After Cléo portentously buys a black hat,
she and Angèle take a cab back to Cléo's apartment. In most
Hollywood films, this cab ride would be extremely short or
cut out of the plot altogether, but Varda's ride lasts for
a solid five minutes, creating a "dead spot" in the
narrative that nonetheless serves several functions. First,
the scene contrasts the tough female taxi driver--who tells
a story about a reckless fight she had with youngsters who
refused to pay their fare--with Cléo and her cancer fears.
Secondly, Varda sneaks in a bit of social / media
commentary; as a shampoo ad plays on the taxi radio, Angèle
gingerly pats her hair, indicating with this silent gesture
both her fundamental insecurity and advertising's
exploitation of this insecurity. (The radio also broadcasts
a news story about Algeria, foreshadowing the appearance of
the soldier at the film's end and, coincidentally, laying out
the French-Algerian conflict for contemporary viewers.)
Most interestingly, much of the scene is shot through the
taxi's windshield, providing--like the location shots in
such early nouvelle vague classics as Shoot the Piano Player
(1960) and Vivre sa vie (1962)--a lovely mini-documentary of
1960s Paris.
Varda's balance of narrative and non-narrative
elements is most poignant in a café scene about halfway
into the film. After a frustrating rehearsal with two
smart-ass pop music composers who treat her like a
troublesome child, Cléo storms out of her apartment.
Throughout the film, Cléo says that she dreads cancer
because she fears the corrosion of her physical beauty, and
she improvises a plan to discover how her attractiveness
and her fame influence the people around her. She enters a
café, programs one of her hit pop tunes on the jukebox, and
strolls around the café waiting for someone to recognize
her. The patrons continue their conversations, blithely
ignoring both her and her song. Cléo's desperate plea for
attention shows the lack of authentic relationships in her
life (a lack partially filled when she meets the soldier),
and Varda emphasizes this lack of connection by juxtaposing
glamorous medium shots of Cléo sweeping through the café
with documentary-style close-ups of the very ordinary faces
of the café customers. Cléo passes through the café, and
through much of Cléo From 5 to 7, like a neglected dream, and
real life rolls on, indifferent to the confusion of one
young woman with cancer.
Vagabond's central character is Mona Bergeron
(Sandrine Bonnaire), a young woman who gives up her
secretary job to live, as the French title indicates,
"without roof or rule." Mona wanders though la France
profonde and has many encounters: she co-habitates with a
new boyfriend in an abandoned villa, she stays with a young
couple who herd sheep (until they justifiably accuse her
of being lazy and she leaves), she develops an uneasy
friendship with a college professor, she works pruning
vineyards with a new Tunisian boyfriend, and finally she
falls in with a gang hanging out at a bus terminal,
initiating a series of events that lead to her death.
Although Cléo focuses on a celebrity in existential
crisis and Vagabond tells the story of the life and death
of a homeless "nobody," various concerns and themes unite
the two films. Vagabond is punctuated with long, patient
shots of Mona trooping across the rural French countryside,
shots which, like the scenes through the windshield in
Cléo, give us an documentary sense of the protagonist's
surroundings. And both films are obsessed with the dynamics
of the gaze, male and otherwise. Men constantly look at
Cléo, and the café scene makes it clear that she has
internalized these gazes and now believes that physical
beauty and fame is all she has to offer to the world. One
of the earliest shots in Vagabond shows Mona, in a
non-invasive long shot, emerging naked from the sea and
striding on a beach; in subsequent shots, two young toughs
stare at her and talk about how she "wants it," but these
guys, perhaps sensing her strength and iconoclasm, are
afraid to approach her. Varda builds on Mona's strength
throughout the film, characterizing her as both an object
of male desire and as a sexual being with desires and
attractions that she expresses and initiates. Mona rejects
the advances of a horny truck driver ("No rides for free,
eh?"), initiates the romance with the Tunisian vine-pruner
by holding his hand, and reacts to a picture of a man by
saying, "He's cute...I could go for him," even while
carrying on a conversation with the man's girlfriend. By
dropping out of conventional society, she leaves behind
conventional sexual mores as well, challenging male gazes
even while she engages in looks and lusts of her own.
Cléo From 5 to 7 makes reference to other films and filmmakers
through various instances of clever casting; one of the
musicians that drives Cléo out of her apartment is nouvelle
vague composer Michel Legrand, and midway through the film
Cléo watches a brief film-within-a-film, a parody of a
silent comedy, that stars Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, and
Eddie Constantine. Vagabond, however, alludes to other
movies in different and more profound ways. Vagabond begins
with Mona frozen to death in a ditch and is structured as
a series of flashback reminiscences offered up by the
people that Mona met during the last three months of her
life. As Varda acknowledges (and as several critics, most
notably Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, have discussed in detail),
this structure is cribbed from Citizen Kane, a move that
punctures Kane's bourgeois sense of tragedy and
self-importance by implicitly suggesting that to die alone,
old, rich, and in a comfortable bed is better than to die
alone, poor, and young due to starvation and exposure.
Another film Vagabond cites is Godard's classic
Weekend (1967). The films share many similarities,
including:
- Somewhat unlikeable protagonists (Mona, Weekend's
married couple Roland and Corinne) traveling through a
rural France defined by its sexual predation (particularly
in and around cars and trucks) and grueling labor;
- "Philosophical" characters (Vagabond's philosophy
scholar turned goat farmer, Tom Thumb and Emily Brönte in
Weekend) who condemn the behavior of the central
protagonists;
- Representatives workers from the "Third World" (Mona's
Tunisian boyfriend, the Arab and African garbagemen) that
allow both auteurs to comment on imperialism; and
- A scene in each film where a woman (Mona, Corinne) is
assaulted in the woods, and the camera tracks past the
human figures, denying the audience a view of the rape as
it occurs.
So why does Varda make these connections? One significant
difference is that Weekend is outrageously satiric; Godard
presents the film's cannibalism, auto-violence, and sexual
politics in exaggerated, surreal, hysterical, Buñuelian
ways, but Vagabond is a scrupulously realistic film. Mona
lives in a world where there are no free rides: everyone
exploits everyone else, and that's just the way things are.
And Vagabond's casual portrayal of these brute facts makes
the film, for me, much sadder than either Weekend or
Citizen Kane.
Cléo and Vagabond are quintessential examples of
the art film, a mode of narration which, according to David
Bordwell, includes ambiguous characters, meandering,
episodic plots, serious themes, and non-narrative flourishes
of style. I adore foreign art films, and I love all of
Varda's work that I've seen, but I also realize that the
art film is a relic of the past and that most contemporary
spectators consider movies such as Lock, Stock And Two Smoking
Barrels (1998) and Dogma (1999) ambiguous and "arty" enough
for their tastes. Folks like this should stay a hundred
miles away from Vagabond. But if you still value the work
of such great foreign auteurs as Kurosawa, Fellini, and
Kiarostami (and I'd certainly include Varda on this list),
or if you love the films of the French New Wave, you'll
find these DVDs indispensable.
Cléo From 5 to 7 and Vagabond are now available on DVD from The Criterion Collection. The digital transfers for both movies were supervised and approved by director Agnès Varda. Suggested retail price: $29.95 each. For more information, check out the The Criterion Collection Web site.
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