Les femmes SDF: Agency and Verisimilitude in Contemporary French Film

Abstract

In 1985, Agnes Varda laid bare the realities of homeless and vagrant women on screen. With its quasi-documentary style, Sans toi ni loi recounts a vagabond woman’s sad, if not tragic, demise. More recently, the films Les Invisibles (2018) and Sous les étoiles de Paris (2020) have explored the experiences of homeless women. They take center stage in these films and force the viewer to confront their plights, one in a fairytale-like fiction, the other in a dramedy. This paper first outlines Varda’s itinerant main character and then introduces the more recent films as reflections of current social realities. Finally, the resonance of all three films with the recent Oscar winner Nomadland, in which members of the itinerant American subculture play themselves or versions of themselves, will be addressed. The impact of these performances and the presence of those with lived experience within the narrative merit further exploration.