In winter in the south of France, a young woman is found frozen in a ditch. She’s unkempt, a vagabond. Through flashbacks and brief interviews, we trace her final weeks as she camps alone or falls in with various men and women, many of whom project their needs onto her or try to give her life direction. She squats in an old house smoking hash with a man, falls for a Tunisian laborer and works beside him pruning grape vines, stays with a couple shepherding goats, meets an agronomist trying to save plane trees, gets tipsy with an old woman, and has an offer to appear in porn films.
The original work of Agnés Varda, Sans Toit ni Loi (1985), conveys a completely different world to its audience. Our main hero is Mona; He is a person who has no place and belongs to anyone, spends his life here and there, without thinking, and at the beginning of the movie he is in a field frozen from the cold. The audience, familiar with the mainstream, immediately wonders why Mona fell into this state, as Varda knows very well.
As a matter of fact, when Varda returns to a few months ago, he explains that he has acquired information through a “divine” outside voice through the encounters with Mona during this time period and begins to convey them. But none of them satisfy the audience sufficiently. It neither gives Mona the opportunity to fully learn about her past, to make sense of her actions, nor to catch a clue in terms of the course of the story.
While keeping the audience’s unceasing sense of curiosity alive with the crumbs it occasionally gives, Varda keeps the attention high by never stopping it. In fact, what Varda does is to succeed in melting these two opposing species in the same pot by giving us Mona’s fictional story in a documentary mood.
Sans Toit ni Loi (1985)
Directed by: Agnès Varda
Starring: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Stéphane Freiss, Jean-Louis Perletti, Francis Balchère, Urbain Causse, Dominique Durand, Christophe Alcazar, Joël Fosse, Patrick Schmit
Screenplay by: Agnès Varda
Production Design by: Jean Bauer, Anne Violet
Cinematography by: Patrick Blossier
Film Editing by: Patricia Mazuy, Agnès Varda
Makeup Department: Brigitte Parquet
Music by: Joanna Bruzdowicz
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: MK2 Diffusion (France)
Release Date: December 4, 1985
Hits: 58
