VAGABOND (Agnès Varda, 1985)

Sandrine Bonnaire, excellent, is Mona Bergeron, a backpacking dropout and drifter who appears in farmland country. She comes from the city; or (although dry) she walked out of the sea, according to one legend. Legends, gossip, interviews; a wide glance at the girl is pieced together by police after her corpse one morning is found in a ditch.
     Beautifully written and directed by Agnès Varda, Sans toit ni loi—literally, Without Roof or Rule—is constructed as a curve-around narrative, its flashbacks and testimonies proceeding from the ditch and ending there; but the circle is incomplete. Whereas the film begins with Mona’s death from exposure to the elements, it ends with her still alive. She has stumbled into the ditch for what she may think is a night’s sleep. She cannot muster strength to raise herself and in any case has no place else to go.
     Abrasive, defiant, solitudinous even when pretending to be sociable, Mona has turned off with her attitude everyone with whom she has come into contact. She hasn’t revealed herself. But the construction of the narrative, which leaves Mona alive even as we know she has already died, lays responsibility for her fate, at least partly, on us.
     We needed to make more of an effort to get to know this child. We should have done more to protect her. Kids are too busy being themselves, or who they think are themselves, to know when they need our help, and too stubborn and proud to ask for it even if they do know.
     When they callously manipulate us, they are doing what they need to do in order to survive. If we respond defensively, moralistically, we are putting them into the ditch.
     Varda’s indefatigably humane film won the top prize at Venice.

EMBASSY (Chris Marker, 1973)

All political directions have gone bankrupt.

Another extraordinary film by Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, a.k.a. Chris Marker, L’ambassade constitutes an anecdotal response to Pinochet’s September 11, 1973, military coup against Chile’s democratically elected Allende government. It risks charges of coyness and rank manipulation in order to create a compelling pseudo-documentary portrait of two things: the chaos that the coup wrought; the wider implication for democracies elsewhere. At the last we learn that what we thought was the French embassy in Santiago is really some other embassy in Paris. It is in Marker’s France that dissidents are being rounded up daily and mass executed nightly. One wonders whether Marker was familiar with the sixties U.S. Twilight Zone episode in which Agnes Moorehead wars with tiny alien invaders, who it turns out are the U.S. military.
     The set-up lays claim to serendipity. Some unidentified cameraman, whose voiceover we listen to, is among those who have reached sanctuary in the embassy and await safe conduct out of the country. People bond as the ambassador, to encourage that everyone pull together, vacuums the floor in their suite. Armed with his handheld camera, the speaker shoots everything in Super 8, achieving a raw facsimile of cinéma-vérité. The silent footage protects the final surprise awaiting us but also consigns the pulsating present to an archival repository of repetitive fascist history. By degrees dissidents become contentious, revealing the fractiousness of the Left that, Marker implies, facilitates right-wing inroads and coups. There are so many “Lefts” confronting the Right, a monolithic beast that can count on the support of the C.I.A.
     Marker therefore takes aim at the complacency of those “good guys” who fail to grasp that their potential to ward off political demons resides in their solidarity, not their free expression or creative individualism.