Oftentimes, we praise a film because it has provided one or more in-depth character portrayals, revealing the motivations and psychology of some of the key characters. Is it possible for a film to be brilliant precisely because it reveals almost nothing about its central protagonist? Agnés Varda's magnificent film Vagabond answers that question unequivocally in the affirmative. This is a film that uses the enigma of its central character to reveal something profound for each one of us – about ourselves.

Historical Background: Agnés Varda was one of the first, great female film directors and has gradually matured into the role of Grande Dame of the French New Wave. She was a spearhead of feminist cinema, even before such a concept had crystallized. She was born May 30th, 1928 in Brussels. Her ancestry is a mix of French and Greek. She grew up in France and studied at the Sorbonne and the Ecôle du Louvre. She had intended to become a museum curator but a stint as a photographer of the theatre gave birth to her interest in filmmaking. She made her first film, Pointe courte, in 1954. It is considered a harbinger of the French New Wave, especially because Alain Resnais provided the editing. Like some other New Wavers, Varda often used nonprofessionals along with professional actors. Her style was also very experimental. Varda worked in both fiction and documentary and sometimes integrated the two forms, as in the present film. Her first big hit was Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962). After three more films in the sixties, her pace slowed in the seventies and eighties, but during those decades she produced two of her best films: One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977) and Vagabond (1985), which is generally regarded as her finest masterpiece. She made a film as recently as 2002 (at age 74!), so her career in filmmaking has spanned almost fifty years. Varda was married to director Jacques Demy and supervised the restoration of his classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).

The Story: The film opens with a shot of a dreary winter landscape. The camera pans slowly across the withered terrain, then freezes suddenly on the figure of a person lying in a ditch. It is a young woman, though she looks somewhat more like an animal in some respects. Her hair is densely matted, her face is smeared with something like mud, and her clothing is ragged and tattered. She appears to be dead. A man working in the field spies her and seems to concur with our own impression. He runs back to the farmhouse, declaring that he's come across a dead woman. The police are quickly called and are soon swarming around the corpse, taking photographs and measurements. A female narrator (Agnés Varda) now speaks in voiceover:

No one claimed the body. She had died a natural death without leaving a trace, but people she had met recently remembered her. Those witnesses helped me tell of the last weeks of her last winter. She left her mark on them. I know little about her myself, but it seems to me that she came from the sea.

The film now begins to unveil the story of those last few weeks in semi-documentary fashion, through interviews, with those witnesses, and reenactments of their testimony through flashbacks. It is the beginning of winter in rural southern France and the first live glimpses we get of the young woman, Mona Bergeron (Sandrine Bonnaire), will be the most primordial and appealing ones. Mona emerges from the ocean, fresh, clean, and in the buff, though we see her only from a respectful distance, from the vantage point of two bikers on a nearby roadway, who are debating whether to try to make the young woman's acquaintance. They opt not to, however. Over the course of Mona's wanderings across the landscape during the next hour-and-a-half, she comes into contact with quite a number and variety of people, some offering her rides, food, or shelter, some simply chasing her away, but all of them receiving in return only the same detached and thankless response from Mona.

There's a truck driver with whom Mona hitches a ride. No sooner is she in the truck than she complains to him, "What a heap! Not even a radio!" He stops and makes her get out. Later, Mona links up for a while with a young man who is living in a basement room of an old mansion. He is a self-proclaimed "wandering Jew" and wears a chain and padlock around his neck. She smokes his marihuana and sleeps with him, but when he gets into a scuffle with some burglars, she takes off while he's out cold on the floor. He tells the narrator, "I thought she was a homebody, the staying kind." But Mona is not the staying kind. She makes no connections and always moves on.

Mona lives for a while with a goat herder and his wife and child, not to mention about one hundred goats. The goat herder understands Mona perhaps as well as anyone in the film, having done a lot of wandering himself. Many of his friends had been vagrants and ultimately perished from the weariness and loneliness of the road. He and his wife try to "save" Mona, by offering her an alternative. They not only feed her but they fix up a room for her, in a trailer. She mentions wanting to have a piece of land to grow potatoes. The goat herder not only offers her a patch of land, but also says he'll plow the field for her in the spring and she'll only need to plant and tend the garden. The reality, however, is that Mona is devoid of ambition. She sleeps all day, smokes, lets her trailer become filthy, and does nothing to help with chores. "She blew in like the wind," the goat herder tells the narrator, "No plans, no goals, no wishes, no wants. We suggested things to her. She didn't want to do a thing."

At another time, a woman professor, Mme. Landier (Macha Meril), gives Mona a lift. She later tells a friend about how badly Mona reeked but that she couldn't very well throw her out after having picked her up. When Landier asks some questions, Mona offers that she doesn't really mind. "All drivers talk to their rides, so I makes things up," she says. Landier is an agronomist (tree-specialist) and researcher, who is trying to find a cure for a fungus that is slowly wiping out the plane trees. Mona thinks that's a pretty dumb idea, but Landier replies, "But to do nothing to stop the plague is even dumber." Mona likes riding in Landier's car and Landier seems to get off on helping the disheveled vagrant. She even shows her off to one of her colleagues, Jean-Pierre (Stephane Freiss), a former student. Ultimately, however, Landier drops off her young passenger at the roadside, near a woods.

For a while, it seems that Mona might settle down with a Tunisian vine cutter, Yahiaoui Assouna (played by himself). The rest of the workers are taking a brief vacation, so he takes her in. She even works beside him, for a while, in the vineyards. When the other workers return, she gets thrown out, however.

In another old mansion, there's a lonely housekeeper named Yolande (Yolande Moreau) who is caretaker for an old Countess, Lydie (Marthe Jarnias). The old woman is nearly stone deaf and very decrepit. Yolande has a young boyfriend, Paulo (Joel Fosse), but he only uses her because she provides him with money. He and his pals survive breaking into homes and it is he who got into the scuffle with Mona's temporary boyfriend during one such break-in. Yolande is a romantic who just wants a little tenderness and is envious when she observes Mona, at one point, snuggling with the wandering Jew. Yolande invites Mona to stay with her in the Countess's mansion, but gets nervous when Mona thinks her boyfriend cute and then hits it off with the Countess. In one of the few truly funny scenes of the film, Lydie and Mona get drunk together on the old lady's brandy. You haven't seen anything until you've seen a doddering old grandmother totally wasted and giggling like a teenager. They laugh about her nephew who can't wait until she dies so he can inherit her home. The nephew turns out to be the same young man, Jean-Pierre, who was the Professor's former student. He finds out that it was Yolande's boyfriend who broke into another mansion and uses that revelation as an excuse to fire Yolande and have Lydie shipped off to an old folks' home.

From here, things go progressively downhill for Mona. She starts hanging out with a group of vagrants at a bus station and finds a guy among them with whom to sleep. They bum cigarettes and change from passersby. Mona has to flee, however, when an altercation between her latest man and another results in a major fire. She ends up in a small village where a wine festival is underway, in which men dressed up as vines and trees try to catch the young women of the village and dunk them in a wine vat. Mona gets chased down and smeared with wine paste before escaping into a telephone booth. She is drenched, however, and that aggravates her cold exposure, leading to her final bewilderment, disorientation and surrender in the ditch. By the time she's found, rigor mortis has already set in.

Themes: This is a richly thematic film. There's no mystery to the film, since we know the outcome from the very beginning, and the plot is pretty low key, but the themes are profound. The first obvious thematic issue is just who is Mona and how did she end up frozen to death in a ditch. The marvel of this film is not in what we learn about Mona but in what we don't learn. Mona is revealed to us only as an enigma. She seems to be a person without a past and with no coherent purpose in life. Nobody truly knows her and Mona seems actually to require that kind of anonymity. Mona is a vagabond who values only her freedom. The one clearest thing that we learn about Mona is that she will leave every situation behind when the whim suits her. Though she relies on the kindness of people whom she encounters, she is often brash and rude in return. No matter! By the time anyone grows tired of her attitude, she's moving on. When the goat herder demands that she help out a bit, she leaves, saying that she didn't go on the road to find another boss.

Mona is the ultimate societal dropout. She finished high school and was once employed as a secretary, but found the work so unsatisfying and so resented being bossed around that she has opted for the freedom of the road, despite the constant survival struggle that it presents. No rules, no bosses, no routine, no order. Her entire life is comprised of moving about, looking for places to sleep, begging for food and water, or working briefly to earn a bit of money for food ("bread for bread" as she says) or cigarettes. When opportunities arise for a more stable existence, she always turns them down in the end. Mona has no hopes or ambitions toward which to work. "I don't care," she says, "I move." She has few enjoyments in life, other than music (on car radios or the jukebox), cigarettes, and, possibly, sex (we know she does it, but not whether she enjoys it).

We never learn why she is so totally alienated. At the end of the movie, we still don't know the why or the how of Mona and, we suspect, she may not know either. Mona's empty gaze seems to reveal a vacant mind, as directionless as the barking dogs that also pervade the film. Mona is not only disheveled, but also has no interest in cleanliness. So many of the characters that she meets complain about her smell that we almost begin to smell her ourselves.

Why then, is this lack of revelation of the central character a positive feature of this film? Normally, we would view it as a negative. What makes it brilliant instead is that Mona serves as a kind of mirror that causes all who meet her to reflect upon themselves and their own sorry or troubled lives. This effect that Mona has extends from the other characters in the film, to Varda as director, and finally to us as viewers. The various other characters, even the ones that have sex with her, cannot know or understand Mona because she is both utterly unique and zealously private. Although they and we learn precious little about Mona, we all learn a little bit more about ourselves. The recollections of Mona that each character offers reveal more about themselves than about Mona. Mme. Landler remembers mainly her craving to help Mona and says, "She's so alone. I should have done something. I don't even know her name." The motorcyclists who watched her bathing at the beach at the beginning remember how they chickened out instead of trying to meet her. A woman who filled Mona's water bottle from her pump later envies Mona's freedom. Yolande imagines Mona's brief relationship with her wandering Jew as a romantic ideal. A person who bought cheese from Mona on the street says, "She's got character. She knows what she wants." Then she turns to her husband and says, "If I'd sent you packing at her age, I'd be better off. Marry the wrong guy and you're stuck for life." For some, Mona represents the ideal of freedom and the forks in the road not taken. Mona activates regrets for these characters. For others, Mona is a source of fear. The foreman at the vineyard worries about his young daughter turning out like Mona. A gas station owner gives Mona some work washing cars but won't trust her to pump gas. He opines, "Female drifters are all alike, just loaf and chase men." In truth, he's not that far off, in Mona's case. Mona is a blank slate onto which we can each transcribe our own hopes and fears.

Amazingly, Varda reveals that she too is susceptible to Mona's enchanting influence. She uses a subjective camera technique – the kind of "watching device" later perfected by Godard in films like My Life to Live. Varda watches Mona from a distance or, other times, lets Mona walk into a landscape already in the camera lens and then follows after her with the camera, as we do when someone catches our eye. Varda was herself something of a free-spirit who set her own course in life and one feels her sympathy for her prime character, here.

Finally, however, we discover a piece of ourselves in this poor vagabond's lonely life. We define ourselves in part by the not-self we observe around us and Mona serves as a particularly startling element of the not-self. Her travails become a metaphor for our existential isolation, our wanderings through life, touching others at times, but never truly coming to know very many other people. We think about the routines of our lives and our obligations. We think about how many constraints there are on our options and we are simultaneously attracted to and repelled by Mona's freedom and the terrible loneliness that comes with it. Mona is, after all, not a complete person, but a part of us all. Mona is the wings of absolute and decadent freedom, a hero who rebels against boredom and routine, stability and security. She is also a fool, making herself a prisoner in her search for perfect freedom.

The final theme of Vagabond is the destructive slide that must inevitably result from dropping out altogether. We watch Mona's ever-increasing dishevelment and bewilderment and it is frightful to observe, especially because her humanity declines with her appearance. This is no utopian glorification of freedom that Varda is presenting. Sometimes Varda lets us hope that Mona has finally found something or someone she can attach to, but we are disappointed each time. The goat herder, who is a philosopher by training, observes, "The time comes when if you go on, you destroy yourself." He tries to save her from her despair, but in the end he has to concede that she is lost. "You're no dropout," he says, you're just out. You don't exist." Later, he sums up Mona's mode of existence to the narrator, "It's not wandering, it's withering." Like the fields around her, Mona is withering in the winter of her discontent. She slowly fades out of existence.

Production Values: Although Vagabond is presented in semi-documentary style, the story was actually entirely fictional. Varda uses an interesting narrative structure, dividing the story up into over sixty individual scenes, or vignettes, to add to the sense of fragmentation and fracturing of the main character from the rest of society. Though each vignette could be viewed in isolation, the characters from the various vignettes turn out to interact sometimes in strange ways with characters from other vignettes, showing the interweaving of society, even as Mona remains isolated from it. The other fascinating thing about the film stylistically is the extent to which Varda takes a noncommittal stance toward her protagonist. She seems not to either approve or disapprove of Mona's lifestyle. She merely reports it. This increases the "mirror effect" for her main character, forcing each viewer to consider Mona and her choices from the viewer's own personal perspective and personal issues with his or her own life. Since the film takes no stance, our own becomes all the more relevant to the viewing experience.

An exceptional aspect of the cinematography of Vagabond is the extent to which Varda makes her protagonist part of the frozen, wintry, French landscape. Mona may not belong to human society but she belongs to the woods, fields, roadways, and, even, that final ditch, just as do the wildlife and barking dogs. From the very beginning of the film, Varda establishes the mood of the spaces in which Varda exists (or existed). The color scheme remains pale and bleak and the soundtrack features languorous violins. Southern France, where the film was shot, is the most rural and wildest part of the country. Varda, who is widely sought out as an educator, speaker, and mentor, once said, "I'm tired of the fact that French films never have space, as if the entire universe of the French cinema were psychological, internal and enclosed." Varda keeps us external to Mona, observing her from the outside and revealing little of her interior motivations.

Sandrine Bonnaire's performance as Mona is utterly stunning and intelligently nuanced. Her character remains the entire focus of the film throughout. Bonnaire has the kind of mystique about her that makes you want to stare and study, but her features reveal almost nothing about her interior motivations. Instead, we watch the external swagger and wonder what lies beneath. She communicates only through glances, attitudes, and facial expressions. Always, we look for motivation in a character but here we are faced with a character that is, in the last analysis, aimless. Bonnaire won the 1985 Meilleure Award for Best Actress (French equivalent of an Oscar) for her performance here. She was nominated five other times, but this was her only such trophy. Bonnaire's other best-known work includes roles in A Nos Amours (1984), Police (1984), Monsieur Hire (1989), and La Cérémonie (1995). Varda also demonstrates exceptional capacity to extract interesting and revealing performances from the rest of her cast, professionals and nonprofessionals alike. One sees no obvious difference between the two.

Bottom-Line: Vagabond is both breathtaking and heartbreaking. It is also unique in its thrust. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. It might have taken more awards had it not been up against Ran, in 1985. The Criterion DVD provides a magnificent video digital transfer with an aspect ration of 1.66:1, created from a 35mm positive. The soundtrack is crisp and clear. There are no extras on this DVD, but the film, at least, is beautifully presented. Vagabond is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 105 minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from France:

Alphaville
Amélie
The Battle of Algiers
La Belle et la Bête
Bob le Flambeur
Le Boucher
Boudu Saved from Drowning
A Bout de Souffle
La Cage aux Folles
Céline and Julie Go Boating
La Cérémonie
La Chèvre
Children of Paradise
Cléo from 5 to 7
Un Coeur en Hiver
Contempt
Cyrano de Bergerac
Delicatessen
The Dinner Game
Diva
The Earrings of Madame de . . .
Entre Nous
Eyes Without a Face
La Femme Nikita
Forbidden Games
French Cancan
Grand Illusion
Harvest
Hate
The Horseman on the Roof
Jean de Florette/Manon
The King of Hearts
Last Year at Marienbad
Life and Nothing But
Madame Rosa
A Man Escaped
Le Million
Monsieur Hire
The Mother and the Whore
La Nuit de Varennes
Pépé le Moko
Peppermint Soda
Playtime
Providence
Rififi
La Ronde
Round Midnight
The Rules of the Game
Le Samourai
Summer
A Sunday in the Country
The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe
Three Colors
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Wages of Fear

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age