Review of Vagabond (1992) by Michael O — 04 Mar 2009

Every once in a while there is a work of art or a magnificent person that twirls my noodles around and changes my perspective on things. As much in my lifestyle as in my way of making films.

Agnes Varda and her film have done this for me.

This movie is profoundly affecting. It is a brilliant antidote to the adolescent fixation on so-called freedom that the 'beats' and all sorts of other road poet literature have seduced us with. Take Sean Penn's INTO THE WILD. The kid in that movie is a rebel heart and he takes to nature like some kinda Jack London. Sure, we see all the warning signs that tell us that something is wrong with this voyage but Penn's style makes Alexander Supertramps story so rock n' roll that even when he reached his final discovery (life is better when shared with others or something to that effect)the audience is led to believe that he HAD to take that road to achieve any sort of self-discovery. Hey, it may be true but not all of us are mad road poets. And Penn ignores an inherent mental incapacity in a man who's willing to believe that giving everything up to starve and die is something heroic. Though it's surely brave.

In VAGABOND our rebel heart is a filthy creature in mind and body. It's easy for the people who meet her to be repulsed and also remain in complete awe of her because it's beautiful to think that absolute "freedom" is something worth pursuing. We wish we were sociopaths: as much as vagabonds as we would like to be high school teacher super spy serial killers on weekends. We want to live outside society and the law, we want to work outside the paradigm of our civilization, and we think that by simply attaching non-violence to rebellion that we'll be happy. Sorry to say that Kerouac drank himself to death, McCandles died sans epiphany and surely in pain, and that ultimately beyond the page or screen there is no poetry to complete mental isolation.

A man in the film is a philosopher and yet he lives in a ramshackle barn with hundreds of goats taking care of his wife and kid. All of his education and his life's contemplation has led him to understand that life in model civilization doesn't have to be the same for all since our expectations from life are different. Through his understanding he reasons that Mona the vagabond's journey isn't anything more than withering. "She is working to support a system that she rebels against.".

The confusion of life is enough to suffer through. We live in a society where we feel we've had a loss of dignity or of special significance and that we're in some form slaves. This is all on one very palpable angle. True or not. Yet we are not being murdered in mass numbers, we are not being infected with disease, we are not told what to read or not read by force. What censors we have in our life is a desperate media and a frightened federal system that are weak and simple to ignore. We have the privilege to overcome them and by "rejecting" them through poorly thought out self-destruction we allow them to thrive and fester. Remember, outside and inside the confines of civilization we are allowed to love freely. We can't ignore that human feeling because without it we are lost. In modern society... the vagabond is traveling sickness.

VAGABOND like the recent WENDY AND LUCY are enough to make one think.