Vagabond

A moving portrait and one of the highlights of 1980s French cinema.

At a time in the 1980s when almost all the attention was focused on stylish young directors such as Beneix, Besson and Carax, Agnès Varda appeared with a film that, despite its somewhat bleak atmosphere, had an almost magical radiance. It also marked the definitive breakthrough of the great acting talent Sandrine Bonnaire.

A farmer finds a young woman, nearly frozen, in a ditch by the road. She is lifeless. Using techniques that are almost documentary in style, Varda tells the story of this young woman and how she came to be where she was found. The story follows her along the highway, while interviews with people who met her attempt to build a fuller picture of her. She sought solitude, and almost unconsciously affected everyone she met. Her outward appearance was rarely appealing, but her behaviour was rebellious. Even so, many people are left with a fond or sympathetic memory of her.

Vagabond is a moving portrait of a woman, and the film’s achievement is that audiences feel they have met this woman themselves by the time they leave the cinema. Vagabond is not a “mockumentary”, but a story based on real events that combines techniques from both fiction and documentary. Varda herself has said that much of the film took shape along the way, as the crew followed the young woman’s trail and met people along the road. Perhaps Vagabond is one of the best road movies ever made, at least in a European sense. In American road movies, attributes such as cars and guns are conventions that illustrate the genre; in Vagabond, there is only the person and the highway. Life unfolds as you walk.