Vagabond

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

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 emerged with a film that, despite its somewhat bleak mood, had an almost magical radiance. It also marked the definitive breakthrough of the great acting talent Sandrine Bonnaire.

A farmer finds a young woman, badly frozen, in a ditch by the road. She is lifeless. Using an almost documentary approach, Varda tells the story of this woman and how she came to be where she was found. The story follows her along the road, while interviews with people who met her gradually build a fuller picture of her. She sought solitude, and almost unconsciously affected everyone she encountered. Her 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 one of the film’s achievements is that audiences feel they have met her by the time they leave the cinema. Vagabond is not a “fake documentary”, 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 woman’s trail and met people on the road. Perhaps Vagabond is one of the best road movies ever made, at least in a European sense. In American road movies, conventions such as cars and guns illustrate the genre; in Vagabond, there is only the person and the open road. Life unfolds as you walk.