Film history has always credited French Maverick Jean-Luc Godard for heralding in the French New Wave when he went down the streets of Paris to shoot À bout de soufflé (Breathless) in 1960.
Breathless epitomized the rebellious, anti-establishment spirit of the Nouvelle Vague and its revolutionary influence is graver than any of the equally remarkable first films of Godard s compatriots, Rivette, Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais and Rohmer.
But despite popular belief, the seeds of the Wave were planted in 1965, the day a Belgian director called Agnès Varda made her debut film La Pointe-courte.
Pointe s cinematic and stylistic vision was seeped in the naturalism of the great French director Jean Vigo with shades of early Italian neo-realism.
The doomed romanticism of the plot, set against the breathtaking meadows of the French countryside, was perfectly structured – something completely different from the weepy French melodramas and romances of the 40s and 50s.
But although a large part of Varda s films can easily come under the New Wave banner, one distinction separated the former photographer from her male peers: Portrayal of women.
Filmmakers of the New Wave have always championed the masculinity parade of American directors John Ford, Howard Hawks and others, in both their writings and earlier films. Their female protagonists were constantly cornered into the victim/faithful partner of the male lead, occasionally, depicted as the customary sex-object.
There were exceptions of course such as Jeanne Moreau s Catherine in Truffaut s Jules and Jim and the subsequent works of Rohmer. But hardly any of these films featured a strong-headed and independent character like Cléo of Varda s first masterpiece Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7) in 1961.
Cléo charts the existential journey of a pop singer roaming the streets of Paris for two hours, waiting for her cancer test results. The film combined documentary footage with fiction – a groundbreaking approach at that time. The most startling aspect of Cléo though was the basic notion of telling a story of a character with psychological and philosophical dimensions that can easily be ascribed to a man.
Although Varda is seen as a feminist, the cinematic and philosophical scope of her work goes far beyond the restrictive boundaries of feminism.
But her late 60s and 70s films weren t received with the same acclaim enjoyed by her works. In 1985 Varda triumphantly returned to the film scene to deliver her most successful work to date Sans toit ni loi (The Vagabond) which won the Golden Lion of the Venice Film Festival that year.
Like Cléo, Vagabond creates an inimitable narrative design based on a flow of flashbacks similar to Citizen Kane embedded in various diverse point-of-view structured narrations.
The film opens with a shot of an unidentified young woman s corpse in a ditch in a small village. Cops scan the area as we hear Varda s voice in the background, telling us how she got involved in the mystery of this stranger.
We learn halfway through the film that the victim’s name might be Mona. She s a vagrant, a penniless drifter who wanders aimlessly from one village to the other, relying on the kindness of strangers for food, money, temporary work and shelter.
She tells people that she was born into a middle-class family, that she worked as a secretary before she decided to hit the road and live a life devoid of bosses, rules or obligations. She can be rude, and ungrateful; she cheats, steals and is promiscuous. She doesn t believe in anything but her right to complete autonomy.
Yet seen through Varda s eyes, we sympathize with her; we even start to love her and feel agitated as we see her painful, brutal downfall.
At the end we learn that the truth we learn about Mona are in fact half-truths, judgments or inferences by the people who met her briefly.
Mona represents the absolute notion of freedom: the fantasy of abandoning the platitudes of daily routine and revolting against a meaningless, systematic modern life. But such a fantasy is forced to collide with merciless reality where unconditional freedom can t be exercised without consequences.
But no one really knows Mona. She becomes an empty vessel through which we reflect our own prejudices, fears, illusions and beliefs. She lived and died without anyone figuring out who she was, no different from the hundreds of people who fleet in and out of our lives.
Agnès Varda s The Vagabond is a rare gem. Don’t miss it.
Sans toit ni loi (The Vagabond) is showing as a part of the 1st Woman Film Festival in Egypt today at 8.30 pm at the Creativity Center of the Cairo Opera House. The film contains English subtitles and attendance is for free.
