I’ve often wondered myself whatever happened to the occasional person who is declared missing, and never found. Even here in Prince Edward Island, I know of a couple of cases where a person is last seen on a city street and never, ever, seen again. And in the last couple of weeks, a teenager went missing here in town after leaving a party. Where exactly did these people go??

I suppose it would almost be a relief if we knew these missing people deliberately made themselves missing, because they didn’t meet some horrible end after going home from a party one night, but instead deliberately took it upon themselves to toss their former life away, and run away. But Agnes Varda’s Vagabond doesn’t quite see it that way.

The main character, a young woman, is already dead when the movie begins. She’s found frozen to death in a ditch. It is made quite clear there is nothing suspicious about her death -- she quite simply froze to death. The rest of the movie is the last of this vagabond’s life as she wanders into this French village.

For most viewers, Vagabond will be one long, slow dirge. I mean, the main character is dead, and we know why she’s dead, so there’s no suspense. And the movie doesn’t try to exaggerate the pathetic life of this woman. This is not some big dramatic story -- this is more akin to a cinematic investigation, where we soberly look at all the clues, and make our decision.

Occasionally, we get snippets of interviews (I think, actually, the interviews with police) with all the different people who encountered her during the last few weeks of her life, from a professor, to a farming family, to other villagers. And the plot itself is her encounters with these people. The film can’t be said to have a real plot, since there’s quite a few people in this movie who appear and disappear once the woman disappears from their lives, although a few people, such as the professor and her associates and friends, do play a role throughout much of the film.

The vagabond is a mystery, and then she’s not. In a sense, she’s not a mystery because the way she lives her life is not illogical given her circumstances. She often sleeps in her tent in a middle of a field or in the woods, she often hitches rides with people, she looks like she hasn’t had a bath in weeks (her hair is stringy and greasy and her hands are dirty), and doesn’t have a change of clothes. Her whole lifestyle is something we would expect -- she probably isn’t any different from homeless people we see on the street who have nowhere to go and who try to get what little they can.

But she is a mystery. We don’t know anything about her past, or why she does what she does. There’s some odd throwaway moments where, whenever she encounters a police car or hears a siren, she jumps behind something or generally tries to stay away from their sight. But no explanation I can recall is given for that. There is some point I remember where she says she was a secretary. But then there’s also another point in the film where she says she could very well be lying about her past or what she talks about. So really we have no idea who this woman is.

Sure, all the characters have opinions about her. A few of them think she’s brave for living her own way, completely apart from society. But then there’s also people like the farmers she stays with for a time who say otherwise. But those are just their opinions. The viewer has to figure out what the reality truly is.

The movie stays fairly aloof from its lead character. Because of the way the movie is structured, you’d probably feel pretty detached from the character. You might not get emotionally involved, but you’ll probably think about her in a more clinical kind of way. The vagabond seems to be more of a case study crying out to be understood -- almost a blank slate for the other characters to fill in. It is really only near the end and up to the very last great and painful shot, when we really see the pain she is suffering, when she’s at her lowest -- and then, you realize, she was dead at the start of the movie, so things aren’t going to get any better for her. You see the dangers a person like her will suffer, being vulnerable to other people and to the elements.

And throughout the film, you see she is a person who, without much of anything, pretty much goes for the basics. Shelter, food, sex -- she gets all of these things at points during the story, but she does all these things to fulfill the most basic need. She doesn’t seem to want to participate in society in any deeper way.

I’ve seen this movie on TV many years ago, back in my junior high school days when I stayed up late at night in my room watching the foreign films on my one channel on my black-and-white TV (hoping to find something racy in those crazy French films, of course!). I really didn’t remember much of the film before I watched it this time, although I kind of wished I watched this before I wrote a few of my short stories, one which was about a homeless person, and the other about a runaway woman of a different sort. Vagabond is definitely a interesting, if clinical and dry, approach to the subject.




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV