Director: Agnes Varda
Screenplay: Agnes Varda
Starring: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Meril, Yolande Moreau
Running Time: 105 minutes
Genre: Drama
The film opens with the discovery of the frozen body of Mona Bergeron (Bonnaire) in a ditch. The film goes on to detail Mona's last days, as she aimlessly wanders around rural France, through fragmentary vignettes, and straight to camera interviews with those who knew and were affected by her.
The recent death of revered director Agnes Varda, at the age of 90, robbed the world of cinema of one of it's most innovative, inspiring and compassionate voices. This bleak and powerful drama is one of her most well known and acclaimed works. It's told through a blend of conventional narrative scenes, and documentary-style sequences. There are important parts of the narrative which are not shown. leaving the viewer to work out for themselves what happened. Mona is a drifter, wandering form place to place, exploiting or being exploited by the people she encounters. The only hint of a backstory to Mona is when she comments that she once worked a secretary, and was doing pretty well for herself, but deliberately decided to through it all away and start wandering in search of freedom. The film does not make Mona into any type of hero. On the contrary she takes advantage of people constantly and is often quite cruel, but she is always sympathetic, partly because we know how it is going to end up for her. The film features a stunning central performance from Sandrine Bonnaire, and a bleak portrait of rural France in the middle of Winter where the colours seem to be washed out except for occasional vivid flashes of bright colour in the picture.
This is not an easy watch, and it is not any kind of fun, but it is important and packs a real punch.
No comments:
Post a Comment