Word: mona
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Vagabond opens with the discovery of an unknown girl, frozen in a ditch by the side of the road. The film's action (this is definitely a film, not a movie) retraces the path that led this girl, Mona, to her death...
When we first meet Mona, she's a teen rebel, smoking cigarettes and yelling at people when she doesn't like them. She's running away from something, we don't know what, but we expect to. But we never find out. The film turns out to be not about Mona the girl, but about Mona the symbol. In her wanderings, she encounters different people representing different philosophical outlooks, and her passing through their lives changes them. Interviews with the people who have met or seen Mona are spliced in throughout the action, supposedly to prove that Mona has left...
...meets a goatherd who once majored in philosophy. Yes, this is a cliche. But the humanness of the tall, thin man with wire-rimmed glasses and goatskin clothing, living the simple life with his wife and son, affects you anyway. He tells Mona she is doing nothing but "withering," and offers her a piece of land to care for and give her life meaning. At first she is enthusiastic, thinking she may want to settle down, but soon, she drifts...
Soon after, she meets a woman professor who studies plane-tree disease. This woman tells Mona that one "must do something to stop the plague." Mona brushes off this piece of quasi-philosophy too, but the woman develops a strange obsession with the girl and the freedom that she comes to represent...
Many people, trapped by various aspects of society--including the professor, the goatherd, and a ridiculous grass-smoking stereotype who wears a heavy locked chain around his neck, and says mysteriously, "I threw away the key"-- feel this strange attraction to Mona, and the viewer comes to feel it also. One doesn't quite identify with Mona, because she isn't really a personality, but one does identify with her driving force, the power that keeps her drifting, keeps her moving past opportunities to settle down, or jobs or love affairs...