Word: mona
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...Mona Lisa...
...Mona, if that is her real name, is a woman in her late teens wandering the south of France. But she is no ordinary postadolescent backpacker, for the season is bone-chilling winter, and she is not on a voyage of self-discovery prior to beginning graduate school. She has no home, no friends and no history she cares to discuss--even with herself. Her thoughts are focused on such basic matters as food and shelter...
Agnes Varda's remarkable film Vagabond begins with Mona's end (she is found frozen to death in a ditch) and then recounts the last months of her life through a series of recollections by the people she met on her lonesome road, all of whose insights into her character or motives are banal. The director's style is as bleakly austere as her subject's life. Varda's camera is nearly always at an objectifying distance from Mona, her editing as abrupt as the small changes in the journey's rhythm (here a spot of comfort, there a moment...
...curiously moved by this harsh film, not least because of Sandrine Bonnaire's astonishing performance as Mona. She personifies youth gripped by a self-destructive ideal (in this case radical individualism), but she projects it without petulance or self-pity. She--and the film--insists only on the unknowability of another human being's choices. We are free to decide if that point is irrelevant to us or tragedy enough to explain, if not life in general, then this particular death...
...dialogue has been replaced by lip-synching to pop songs by the likes of Sting and Kate Bush. Keshishian has transformed Catherine, Heathcliff, and Linton from English nobility to pop stars, and added supporting characters like an agent (Nicholas C. Bienstock '88) and a washed up singer (Mona A. Khalil...