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Rating: During the winter season, a young hippie is found dead from hypothermia. We are in the heart of deep France.
Through a series of flashbacks marking its stages, the film reconstructs the protagonist's last winter, perfectly portrayed by Sandrine Bonnaire. She left an office job to embrace freedom, with neither roof nor law. Certainly, the story moves along the edge of allegory. Simone-Mona's path is a true calvary of solitude as a necessary consequence of the choice of freedom: the girl's parable goes through a series of evangelical references (the shepherd and the sheep, the free gift of blood, wounds akin to stigmata after working in the fields, flogging, albeit in a farcical manner, in the finale; the sacrifice). The film is directed by Agnès Varda, known among Doors enthusiasts for being one of the most illustrious participants at Jim Morrison's funeral (whom she had met in Paris), but above all the author of another gem, “Cleo from 5 to 7,” whose protagonist was photographed in the two hours preceding the retrieval of some sensitive medical results. In “Sans toit ni loi,” Varda is also very attentive to setting the axis of language, infused with slang and puns. Through the puns, the absolute impotence and self-referentiality of words in the face of the force of things are evoked; with the different linguistic levels, the interweaving of the various social planes placed in correlation, as in a report on the transversal hypocrisy of an entire world, around the figure of the witness-victim. Each of the other characters, confronted with Mona's absolute uniqueness, develops a sense of guilt towards her: the truck driver from the first hitchhiking leaves her upon seeing her impermeability to advances; the platanologist (Madame Landier, played by Macha Méril, the Renée from “Belle de jour”) abandons her only to belatedly trace her back; the good winemaker expels her not to displease his Muslim brothers; the housekeeper Yvonne, after hosting her, repudiates her because, with the cognac, she practically resurrected — another evangelical feature — the old woman she takes care of; the ex-boyfriend, upon finding her again, sets fire to everything around her. Perhaps the most significant side character is that of the shepherd. Developing the only articulate analysis, he says that the girl, precisely at the moment she demonstrates total uselessness, attests to the strength of the System, which is in no way challenged, as she is not autonomous and lives on charity; Mona abhors, she does not err, as she has no projects, nor prospects; she is “dirty,” and due to the absolute lack of rules and hygiene, she makes everything around her dirty. However, the theme of exterior dirtiness contrasted with hypocrisy, that is, the interior one, is central throughout the film and, in this case, suggests the shepherd’s conformity to the bourgeois approach to understanding reality and humanity; neither rebuking the wanderer's uselessness places him outside the dominant utilitarian perspective; in turn, the professor, who fights for the defense of plane trees, seems to embrace a more constructive vision, but where are the other human beings, for her? The girl, devoid of ties and morals, constituted for the scholar merely an object of amusement, yet another focus of what the companion of one of her former students calls her intellectual trances. And the young scholar will say he is frightened because he is disgusted. No one fully understands the one who, at the end of her wandering, will symbolically pay for everyone, restoring the initial stability to the society she crossed like a disturbing meteor.
Could a Christ-like figure immersed in our times like Mona, with her radical rebellion and choice of marginality, represent the only way to live without compromise? And does her death ultimately demonstrate its total impossibility? Agnès Varda seems to leave the answer open.
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