VAGABOND Movie Review

Sans Toit Ni Loi

The brief life of a young woman named Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), whose frozen body is discovered at the beginning of Vagabond, is recounted in a series of flashbacks and interviews with people who encountered her in her aimless travels. Agnes Varda's shattering portrait of a lost soul is a remarkable work of art that never stoops to neatly packaging this woman's despair into an overly neat dramatic framework. Instead, we learn about her past a bit at a time—we learn a little about her parents, her education, her work history. We also witness the responses she provokes in the people she meets, and over time we in the audience momentarily feel some of those same reactions to Mona's appearance, her anger, and her irresponsibility. But it is not that simple. Possibly, just possibly, our discomfort at seeing Mona stems from our understanding her better than we care to admit. Emotional and mental torment are not as easily explained—or soothed—as we would like, or as movies would often have us believe. Varda knows this, and her honest and piercing film reflects it at every turn. We also know that Mona's story is repeated daily, everywhere, and the outcome is often just as tragic. We generally can look away or do our best to relegate such cases to the universe of statistics, but Varda insists that on at least this one occasion, we stare down this terrible mystery to its logical, inevitable end. Bonnaire and the entire cast are extraordinary in what is unquestionably Varda's masterpiece to date.

NEXT STOP … An Angel at My Table, Mouchette, The Fire Within

1985 105m/C FR Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Meril, Stephane Freiss, Elaine Cortadellas, Marthe Jarnias, Yolanda Moreau; D: Agnes Varda; W: Agnes Varda; C: Patrick Blossier; M: Joanne Bruzdowicz. Cesar Awards ‘86: Best Actress (Bonnaire); Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards ‘86: Best Actress (Bonnaire), Best Foreign Film. VHS, LV HMV, TPV