Everyone's inner definition of the word "being" is plucked a little bit.
"The Fallen Woman of the End of the World"
Of all the films about wandering, Agnès Varda's The Fallen Woman at the End of the World is the one that struck me the most. The heroine Mona is a young girl, and her wandering is neither a romantic escape, nor a long march of ideals and beliefs, but has a certain existential color, a complete rebellion against life.
Varda takes an objective/spectator perspective, showing a female corpse frozen in a ditch from the beginning, telling us the end of the wanderer, and then from here, tracing back to the various people Mona encountered during her wanderings, through their narration, allowing the audience to get a broken, question-marked puzzle.
<h1>First question mark: Where did Mona come from? </h1>
We have no way of knowing where Mona came from, and the director deliberately erased this information, and she gave Mona the beginning of a new life in another way, and also symbolized her break with the old life: she came naked from the sea. As if with the birth of the modern Venus, Mona, with long curly flax-colored hair, bathed indifferently in the icy waters, then put on her jacket, jeans, and huge duffel bag on her back, and continued to wander.
She met a lot of people on the trip, but no one knew where she came from, we only knew that she was not an orphan, she had family, relatives (from her conversations with others), but she was reluctant to talk much. We can guess that she came from an ordinary family, perhaps her parents were no different from ours, and we even know that she had a good education—vocational school, knew English, that she had had an ordinary job—secretary, typist, and that why she had given up all this and chose to wander alone in the cold winter is the second question mark that the audience has no way of knowing.
<h1>Second question mark: Why is Mona wandering? </h1>
On the way, Mona meets a family of shepherds, who take her in, and discovers that the shepherd is actually a doctor of philosophy, and that he chose to be a shepherd in order to get close to the earth—not so much a call of the heart as a philosophical and rational choice. The shepherd tries to help Mona become self-reliant, giving her a piece of land to grow potatoes. But Mona was unwilling to submit to his arrangement, and finally the shepherd angrily accused her, and she replied: "I hate being a secretary, I fired the bosses, and I will not find another one on the road!" "This seems to answer the second question, but we will not know the specific reason, whether it was an unpleasant work experience, a lost love, or a blow to life...
The reason for Mona's wandering can only be summed up in general terms: out of disgust for work, boredom with family, rebellion against the survival options offered by society. But her rebellion is undoubtedly different from that of the shepherds, who rebel against the way of life of industrial society, but Mona is against all socialized ways of life. As the shepherd said, "You are not rejecting tradition, you are withdrawing from society, you do not exist." ”
For the first time, the word "being" was raised so harshly. In France, the birthplace of existentialism, Varda pointedly pointed out that people's views of "existence" are "in society", "existence in social relations", once separated from society, you are nothing, you are equal to "non-existence", Varda set Mona on a "non-existent" path, she revealed the absurdity of the word "existence".
<h1>Mona's way of being</h1>
But Mona "exists" in her own way, playing a variety of different roles in the minds of the people she meets.
In the eyes of the children of the woman she begged for water, she was the embodiment of "freedom";
In the eyes of the housekeeper of the mansion, she is a symbol of "love";
In the eyes of the shepherd, he is willing to fall and hopeless;
In the eyes of female university professors, she is charming and alienated, self-contained...
Those who passed through her life did not change the original intention of her wandering, but because of her, they aroused some distant dreams, just as our fantasies and fictions about the word "wandering" itself.
But then the third question mark confuses us even more:
<h1>What kind of person is Mona? </h1>
It would be pointless if she were just a young and ignorant girl, the problem is that we can't sum up Mona's character, we can't say for sure: how she is...
She was pretty, but dressed in a gray outfit, and she didn't care about being dirty or even smelly; she would go to odd jobs when she was too poor to have money, she would go to bars, let people buy her a sandwich, but at the same time she threw her only change into the jukebox — she loved music and marijuana, and if that was part of her "character," the only message it could give us was that she was young, longing for freedom, and didn't care—does it still need to be said?
She would also donate blood, not for a free lunch, as if for a pastime of nothing to do; she would also talk to a homeless man about a seemingly quiet love affair, but leave without hesitation after eating the other person's marijuana and bread—she seemed to lack humanity, that universal, warm humanity, but she would chat with the lonely old man and make the other person laugh; she would caress the puppy but did not want to help people walk the dog to make money; she chose to wander herself, but did not understand the shepherd's choice. On the one hand she lacked self-pity and never thought how bad her condition was, and on the other hand she seemed vulnerable, and after being raped in the field, she met a man in the vineyard who was willing to take her in, and she immediately trusted him, and it seemed that only this time, she really wanted to stay (it was also here that she revealed that "Mona" was not her real name).
The more we try to generalize, the more we find the contradictions in Mona, she is sometimes numb, sometimes full of humor, sometimes naïve, sometimes very sophisticated, but when we try to use her contradictions to accuse her, we lose our position.
We don't know what the real Mona looks like because we've never tried her life that way. We cannot blame a person who has the courage to leave society because we are not sure that our own way of life is natural and blameless. In mona's witty conversation with the shepherd, Mona once uttered a deafening scolding voice: "Fuck your philosophy, you're as depraved as I am, but you work a little more!" "Yes, does "work" make us noble? Or is farming and shepherding more noble than working in a big city? Is this idea still the idea of "society" added to us?
It's just that Mona's wanderings, who grew up in the city, didn't become beasts, she was still in society, shuttling through the crowds, she inevitably came into contact with people, and in the end, did she really run away from the object she wanted to escape? No, her journey was already doomed to failure. The shepherd had warned her: You choose complete freedom, but what you get is complete loneliness. If you keep going, sooner or later you will ruin yourself.
Mona is finally embarrassed and almost degenerates into the scum of society, and at the end, she first experiences a fire that burns down her only possessions, and she flees in rags, but comes to a strange town where a terrible festival is being celebrated: some disguised trees are looking around for innocent "victims" with mud and wine, throwing their captured objects into a cart filled with wine, and the townspeople close the doors and windows, take shelter, and the unknown Mona becomes the target of everyone. She screamed in fear from the bottom of her heart, persecuted by the real game, and finally collapsed in the ditch exhausted.
It is said that this scene is a stroke of genius, the scene at that time is an unexpected real festival scene, and the actors are also really afraid, trembling and screaming, recorded by the ruthless camera - this is the characteristic of Varda, she is good at retaining some documentary elements in the film narrative, between virtual and real, so that the whole story is full of accident and suspense.
Mona's death became a very "existential" death, it began with absurdity, it began with chance, it seemed like a "game", but it was very real, it was cruel because it didn't make any sense, she could not have died like this, at the beautiful age of her youth, but the rationality of her death was very sufficient, and we can't think of a better ending.
No matter how we watch this movie and how we understand mona's character, one thing is certain: everyone who has projected emotions on Mona, whether they like, envy or dislike, dislike, resent, everyone's inner definition of the word "existence" has been pried a little.
If a film can do that, I guess it's not too much to describe it as "great", not to mention that Varda has always been my favorite female director, and finally, it was a 1985 film that won the Golden Lion for Best Picture at the Venice Film Festival that year.