‘Sandrine Bonnaire regained’: space and mobility in Sans toit ni loi and Prendre le large

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers the parallels that can be drawn between two characters portrayed by Sandrine Bonnaire at distinct junctures in her film career: Mona, a young homeless woman whose wanderings are recounted retrospectively after her frozen corpse is discovered at the start of Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (1985); and Édith, a middle-aged woman who relocates to Morocco to keep her job with an offshored French textile factory in Gaël Morel’s Prendre le large/Catch the Wind (2017). It considers Mona and Édith in the context of a stasis-mobility dynamic identified as central to both films, reflects on the political implications of their mobility and considers a more proximate notion of space, with reference to the theory of haptic visuality explored previously. Prendre le large illustrates the limits of the palimpsestic star image and the recuperative possibilities of a film depicting an immersive encounter with a foreign space. I aim to demonstrate how the quite specific questions of labour and relocation broached in these films point to broader existential issues pertaining to identity and movement, as well as to consider what the two films, in dialogue with each other, might add to current debates around precarity in contemporary cinema.