The ‘free’ woman walking the city has become something of a popular myth, particularly in recent works of biblio-memoir, or ‘autofiction’. In Flâneuse (2016), Lauren Elkin makes a claim for this figure as a feminist reimagining, or at least a re-costuming, of the nineteenth-century trope of the flâneur. In their New Republic review of Elkin’s book, Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye question whether the flâneuse is really the emancipatory triumph of reclamation Elkin and others hail her as:
“The flâneur walks around the city. He is in constant pursuit of knowledge, appreciates aesthetics, and feels most at home in crowds. He is a default subject with no markers of identity. He is male and unattached, or simply a converted feminine mirror, in Elkin’s conception. He is pure receptacle, a pair of eyes with no human relationships and a politics only of witnessing.”¹
This fantasy of pure observation is the familiar dream of masculine objectivity, recognisable from the default citizen enshrined in nineteenth-century jurisprudence as the ‘reasonable man’: middle class, white, educated, neutral. While there is scope for a politicised reinterpretation of the concept of flânerie – see flâner, the French version of Cecile Emeke’s renowned web-series ‘Strolling’; Garnette Cadogan’s 2016 ‘Walking While Black’; the establishment of the ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group in 1977 – changing the gender of a figure of privilege isn’t enough. The obvious riposte to the notion of the flâneuse as a solution to the problem of the ‘objective’ male observer can be found in the now-canonical theory of the 1970s, most obviously Laura Mulvey’s 1975 ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1973): “One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.”² The desire to romanticise narratives of unattached women is, like all fantasies of escape, understandable, but it risks simplifying a narrative – the woman walking alone – that derives its interest and its importance from the politics of female existence: the business of being witnessed, not witnessing. It is not enough to seek a way in which certain, privileged women can assume the mantle of masculine objectivity; it is necessary, instead, to interrogate the concept itself.
This summer has seen the re-release of Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, first released in 1985. The film begins with the discovery of Mona, a drifter, who has frozen to death in a ditch, before tracing – documentary-style – the journey through a cruel winter in rural France that preceded the end of her life. In May, the first feature from writer-director Léonor Serraille, Jeune Femme (2017) had its UK release. Although Serraille’s film is less obviously brutal than Varda’s, the shape of the narrative is the same, with the camera following Paula (Laetitia Dosch) as she wanders through an inhospitable Paris. Unceremoniously ejected from her boyfriend’s flat and carrying his large cat, she drifts from sofa to sofa seeking shelter, before finding work as a live-in nanny and an unlikely employee in a pop-up lingerie shop. Paula, unlike Mona, survives her journey, but read together both films can be seen as anti-flâneuse narratives, or at least illustrations of the habitual misreading that happens to tales of unaccommodated women. The desire to apply a one-size-fits-all concept of ‘freedom’ to the stories flattens them out into straightforward narratives of liberty and the concomitant ‘discovery’ of female identity, all the while ignoring the actual feminist point: the path to subjectivity is fraught with material contingencies. Both protagonists escape certain kinds of prescriptive identity, but the cost of this is high: sexual violence, poverty, and loneliness complicate these emancipatory trajectories.
Jeune Femme has been widely reviewed as a quirky bildungsroman, and Serraille herself describes the film as detailing Paula’s “metamorphosis… from a girl into a woman” and “an object to that of a subject”, echoing, perhaps, the canonical feminist interpretation of Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 as a film about a woman who – over the course of two hours walking around Paris – becomes a desiring subject rather than an object of desire. As Paula leaves Joachim, an older man whose career was made by his naked photographs of her, Serraille’s camera follows her through the streets and into adulthood; her final rejection of the reconciliation that she has spent most of the film seeking provides a closure of sorts. There is certainly a viable reading of the film as a legible narrative of freedom and identity. But although it’s undeniable that leaving a relationship where the power dynamics are dubious at best is a kind of freedom, Jeune Femme puts pressure on these familiar terms. Near the beginning of the film, when Paula is hospitalised for self-harm, the doctor treating her repeats a familiar platitude: at least, he says, she’s a free woman now. “Freedom’s for egotistical bastards”, she replies. In reading Paula’s situation – homeless, jobless, poor, estranged from her family – as a sunny narrative of emancipation and empowerment, we ignore the reality of a life with no stable ties in a society that requires women to have them. Jeune Femme offers no easy solutions, and refuses to conflate womanhood with independence and a kind of catch-all subjectivity. When the social reality of living is ignored, or subjugated to vague symbolism, female subjectivity is sold short: womanhood is situated in a complex network of relationships and obligations that politicise and radicalise the idea of a woman making a life alone. This search for identity often requires, at least at first, a disavowal of gendered social bondage: the abandoning of one’s husband, children, and housework. Indeed, without money and without cultural capital or power, any ‘journey’ from object to subject is extremely difficult. It’s also worth nothing that this is not something that Paula has chosen for herself: she didn’t leave Joachim, but was left for a younger woman.
It is not enough to seek a way in which certain, privileged women can assume the mantle of masculine objectivity; it is necessary, instead, to interrogate the concept itself.
The assertion or assumption of subjectivity in the face of objectification and abuse can certainly come from leaving the domestic environment, whether voluntarily or otherwise, but in both narratives – as in life – the pervasive threat of sexual violence is a complex and systematic problem both inside and outside the home; both on the road and in luxury flats and expensive bars. Many reviews of Vagabond ignore this: Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review, in which he gets Mona’s name wrong, makes an offhand false equivalence between “sometimes selling sex, sometimes getting raped” that suggests he has missed the point of the film – and the concept of consent – entirely. From the first flashback scene in Vagabond, where Mona emerges from the ocean naked, Varda shows us her body from the perspective of the men who are watching her and discussing the sexual opportunities they feel they have been unfairly denied. Later in the film, Mona is raped in the woods by another male onlooker, who tells her “I’ve been watching you for quite a while”. In Jeune Femme, Paula leaves the sanctuary of a friend’s flat when a fellow party guest tries to pressure her into sleeping with him, and towards the end of the film, after the opening of his photography exhibition, Joachim tries to rape her in a back room of the gallery. Walking unfamiliar streets alone is dangerous, and it is also dangerous to stay at home. The acknowledgement that, for women, staying and leaving are both responses to, rather than solutions for, the same problem complicates the distinction between freedom and confinement. Leaving is always accompanied by the urgent practical question of survival on the streets. What is it like to have nowhere to go? What is it like to have nothing to eat? Both Jeune Femme and Vagabond refuse to simplify their sociopolitical realities.
In Elkin’s Flâneuse, during a discussion of borders, she writes that walking around a city can offer an empathetic identification that edges towards the political: “I have learned that it is an act of empathy to be able to un-root yourself, to recognize that none of us are protected by place”.³ But empathy can in itself be something of a get-out clause. Jennifer Cooke, in her article ‘Violations of Empathy’, summarises Lauren Berlant’s warning against identification as a substitute for action: “solidarity built through empathising with the pain of oppression does not, ipso facto, make for an effective political imaginary for structural change.”⁴ Here, we return again to the fantasy of the objective observer: at best naively useless and at worst actively harmful. This is analogous to the current state of film criticism in the UK: an industry that allows people like Peter Bradshaw to write a review of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals in which he calls the brutal rape and murder of a woman and her daughter “a cherry bomb of rage”, “an unwholesome kind of toxic deliciousness”, and refers to the violent rape scene in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle as “darkly pleasurable role-play” is one that refuses to scrutinise its appointed ‘neutral observers’. We might turn instead to Varda’s gloss on ‘empathy’, something that she figures as the practical basis of the documentary-style of Vagabond. Talking to Shelia Heti for the Believer in 2009, Varda describes the film as an act of empathetic identification, rooted simultaneously in an inner need to revolt against the impossibility of freedom and in the social conditions that produces it:
“You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing. But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed. I’m interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.”⁵
“I am not on the road. I am not eating nothing.” Here, Varda acknowledges the distance between her and her protagonist in the actual conditions of a life lived outside of society. Merve Emre, in her critique of the personal essay in the Boston Review, writes too of the limits of empathy, and the benefits of “the conscientious management of feeling”:
“What is true for human relationships is true for art and politics. If I care about building a world, real or imaginary, with you or for you, then I should think about that world in the most accurate and realistic terms possible. I should hold you to the same standards of precision that I hold myself; even—and especially—if we disagree; even—and especially—if that disagreement is uncomfortable and alienating.”⁶
Later in the Believer interview, Varda elaborates upon her documentary-style of filming: “it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.”
The ‘texture’ of truth in Vagabond is partially found in the rejection of consolation. The original French title, Sans toit ni loi translates as ‘With neither shelter nor law’, and is a play on a common French idiom, ‘Sans foi ni loi’: ‘With neither faith nor law’. Dedicated to the novelist Nathalie Sarraute, a key figure in the anti-realist ‘new novel’ school of French literature, the narrative operates with remarkable perspective, carefully mapping out the different configurations of social life that Mona shuns. Each time Mona encounters a potential source of intimacy or stability, she either chooses to leave or they ask her to. Like Jeune Femme, Vagabond directly addresses the problem of freedom in its dialogue, most obviously in the strange episode in which Mona spends some time with a hippy goat farmer, his silent wife and their small child. He explains his life and philosophy to Mona as “a middle road between freedom and loneliness”; later, he offers her a field to grow potatoes in. She accepts, but stays in bed smoking cigarettes all day instead of cultivating her crops. Increasingly infuriated by this refusal to work her field, he calls her a ‘dreamer’, criticising her refusal to join his ‘alternative’ community: “You chose total freedom but you got total loneliness”. The farm, with its focus on ‘natural’ life and segregated female domestic space, is a hessian reproduction of conservative patriarchal structures; Mona’s refusal to participate acknowledges the failure of alternative communities to actually differ from the society they claim to break away from. For the most part, Mona refuses labour that is traditionally gendered female, resulting in a total refusal of care. Unlike Paula, the jobs she takes on to survive are not domestic service but agricultural work; instead of a pet cat, barking dogs are the animal backdrop of her journey. ‘Total loneliness’, here, is the cost of rejecting a life as a secretary and the company of needy men: ‘free woman’ as freedom from womanhood.
In Jeune Femme the distinction between womanhood and girlhood is constantly troubled, and much of this is located in Paula’s relationship to care. Halfway through the film, we discover that Joachim was Paula’s university professor. Their relationship, it is implied, kept her in a kind of arrested development: “You could have taught me things,” Paula tells him, “instead of just taking my photo”. Paula is 31, but appears much younger: as the woman who interviews her for her nannying job tells her: “you sounded under 18”. In the context of Paula’s relationship to maternity her ‘metamorphosis’ from girl to woman seems more like a state of constant oscillation. Rather than rely upon the trope of motherhood, whether biological or surrogate, as a plot device that symbolises progression, Paula shuttles between the haphazard labour of childcare and the regulation commodified girlish sexuality of the lingerie store. The scenes in the middle of the film in which Paula tracks down her estranged mother in a cinema and follows her home set up a familiar tale of maternal reunion, but Serraille refuses to deliver such an easy fix. Paula’s mother bars her from the house and, when she finally manages to get in, the physical scuffling between the women as they fight is partially slapstick and entirely tragic. Later, more spent than reconciled, they sit together in silence on the sofa as the famous maternal reunion scene from Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) plays on the television. Paula’s relationship with Lila, the child she looks after, is tender and full of genuine care, but the knowledge that the relationship is a professional one is present throughout: when Paula loses the job, it’s Lila who breaks it to her, calmly, at the swimming pool. This oscillation is played out in Paula’s own body, too: the remarkable scene in which she discusses her positive pregnancy test with a young doctor plays out like a riddle, as Paula changes her mind rapidly about whether or not she’s able to keep the baby – “stability’s boring” – testing theories out on the doctor like a thought experiment. The absence of the implied termination from the narrative compounds this sense of pregnancy as a device, rather than a physical reality: the body in flux, and the girl-woman on the move.
It’s possible that, ultimately, freedom for both Mona and Paula can only ever be partially and temporarily achieved, in the moments in which they assume other people’s identities with frightening ease. In Jeune Femme, the passivity with which Paula slips into a relationship with Yuki, who believes her to be an old school friend, functions as a complex denial of agency, mirrored by the protracted erotic tension between the two women. Once Yuki discovers her real name, they argue and then sleep together once before parting ways for good: in the consummation comes the end of excitement and possibility. In Vagabond, Mona puts on a housecoat and assumes the identity of Yolande, a near-blind old woman’s home help: they drink and laugh together, before Mona is thrown out. Here, too, there is a sexual tension at play: Yolande has spent the preceding part of the film fantasising about a glimpse of Mona asleep in the arms of a deadbeat boyfriend, projecting her frustration with her own partner onto this image of ‘true love’. When Mona returns alone and reveals this to be a false narrative of intimacy, the possibility of Mona interacting with Yolande’s own boyfriend and the sight of her wearing her housecoat, drive Yolande to eject her from the property. “Do I scare you?” Mona asks the uptight bourgeois son of the woman in Yolande’s care. Later, he answers her question in the voiceover: “She scares me because she repels me”. It’s a truism that repulsion and desire tread a fine line, but in both Vagabond and Jeune Femme the absolute aloneness of Mona and Paula unsettle and attract in equal measure: people are drawn to a person they can project their own ideas of a different life onto, but sharply snap back into disgust when that person reveals themselves to have an existence of their own.
A life of one’s own, however, is ultimately difficult to come by: existence without confinement, dependence or the limitations of hardship is unachievable for either Paula or Mona, despite their different endings. Rather than passive observation – cinematic flânerie – the actively compassionate, political filmmaking of Varda and Serraille depict the difficulty of the struggle for subjectivity in a society in which objectification is relentless: it is not enough to leave everything if you do not have somewhere to go. Both Paula and Mona are certainly escaping something; the question that Jeune Femme and Vagabond are asking about their active solitude is whether there is a liveable alternative to walk towards.
1 ‘Death to the Flâneur’, Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye, The New Republic, March 2017 2 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Viking Adult, 1973) 3 Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse (London: Penguin, 2016) 4 ‘Violations of Empathy’, Jennifer Cooke, new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, vol. 89 (2017) pp. 153-169 5 ‘Agnès Varda’, Sheila Heti, The Believer, October 2009 6 ‘Two Paths for the Personal Essay’, Merve Emre, Boston Review, August, 2017
Helen Charman is a writer and a PhD student researching nineteenth-century maternity, sacrifice, and political economy. She teaches undergraduates at the University of Cambridge, and primary school children at the Hackney Pirates. Her writing can be found in Datableed, The Germ, King’s Review, Dazed and Confused, the LRB Blog and The Inkling Magazine
