In times as motionless as these, our screens provide an escape route from everyday quarantine routines. They offer the possibility to move without moving, to visit a different space and time from the comfort of our homes. They allow us to embark on a “stationary voyage”.
This week, we propose to accompany three wandering women from three consecutive decades. Mona, Rosetta and Wendy do not simply move, though. Their travels spring from a restless necessity to take flight. They flee and drift in an often seemingly aimless manner, constantly bumping into society’s walls, forced to deal with the search for money in the present while striding on in search of a better life in the future.
In Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985), we spend the last “homeless and lawless” weeks of young Mona’s life on the road. Roaming the agrarian plains of the south of France, Mona moves in and out of long tracking shots and in and out of the lives of the people she meets. While Varda lets her protagonist stroll slowly but steadily through vast and desolate landscapes, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne film Rosetta as she runs frantically from one place to another looking for a job in the city of Liège, Belgium. The camera here stays close to the young woman it tries to keep up with. “It moves me to the heart of my heart, this film about the necessity of life, the impossibility of morality, the soil of human experience,” Nicole Brenez wrote about Rosetta (1999). In our final selection, Wendy and Lucy (2008) by Kelly Reichardt, Wendy, too, tries to keep up. Travelling through the United States with her dog, Lucy, and a very simple future ahead (finding work in Alaska), she is confronted with a complex here and now when her car breaks down and she runs out of money.
Sans toit ni loi (Agnès Varda, 1985) is available on Criterion and MUBI.
Rosetta (Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne, 1999) is available on UK Chili.
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008) is available on Vimeo.
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