Varda’s Golden Lion winner is a bleak exploration of a young female drifter’s (Sandrine Bonnaire in an extraordinary performance) unapologetic defiance of the personal and social obligations that seek to tie down her free self.
Review #2,967
Dir. Agnes Varda
1985 | France | Drama | 105min | 1.66:1 | French
NC16 (passed clean) for nudity
Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Meril, Yolande Moreau, Stephane Freiss, Setti Ramdane
Plot: In the south of France, during winter, a young drifter named Mona is found frozen to death in a ditch. Through flashbacks, those who have met her—including a Tunisian vineyard worker and a family of goat farmers—talk of their interactions, revealing the story of an enigmatic and defiant woman.
Awards: Won Golden Lion, FIPRESCI Prize & OCIC Award (Venice)
Source: Cine Tamaris
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Drifter; Rejecting Norms; Survival
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: Criterion Blu-ray
Spoilers: No
The highest-awarded film of Agnes Varda’s unparalleled career, Vagabond scored the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
One of her most successful exploits in feminist cinema, Vagabond is, according to film scholar David Bordwell, a film of many genres—it functions as a road movie, mystery and ‘networked’ film all at once.
It begins as a mystery as a dead body is found frozen in a ditch. It belongs to Mona, a female drifter played by Sandrine Bonnaire in an extraordinary performance.
It’s no doubt her breakthrough role, with her inscrutable face a bleak representation of the enigma of living and dying on one’s own terms.
She is a drifter, and this is where the ‘road movie’ comes in as she hitches rides in cars, or seeks temporary shelters en route to somewhere, faraway maybe… just anywhere where she doesn’t have to perform personal and social obligations in order to function as a human being.
“Shall I show her how we unroot sick trees?”
Free from work and family commitments, Mona finds the purest sense of freedom in her solo travails. The catch, however, is that it is fairly easy to go hungry and cold.
While she finds fleeting companionship in the assortment of locals that adorn her journey (Varda’s film becomes the ‘networked’ film where certain characters drift in and out of the narrative), all of them become eyewitnesses to her existence before her untimely demise.
She simply ran out of luck braving the natural elements and staying true to what she believes is the right reason to live.
Varda’s camera, although unflinching in its gaze on Mona, is also allowed to drift away temporarily in several long takes, giving the protagonist some respite.
While some might chastise Mona for her irresponsible, anti-social ways, Vagabond never makes any clear judgment on her ‘way of life’, one marked by an unapologetic defiance of the odds that are stacked against her, wilfully or fatefully.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Music:
Eternality Tan 