Day 73: Vagabond (1985)

“Vagabond,” our second Agnes Varda film of the week, is certainly an excellent companion piece to yesterday’s “Cleo 5 to 7.” Both honest portrayals of women moving towards an uncertain future, “Vagabond” makes its mark by taking the documentary realism found in its predecessor and utilizing it at its most raw. In doing so, Varda gives us a film that bends fiction in a way that allows the audience to, at times, utterly forget that there is a story to be comprehended and, as they instead become engrossed in watching the protagonist react to her surroundings, they stop feeling that its all staged and begin believing completely in the characters that are in front of them.

In “Vagabond,” our tale begins with Mona, a pretty teenage girl, who lies dead in a ditch. Trying to comprehend how she came to her fatal end, those she encountered on her travels across France reminisce about their experiences with her and what sort of impact she had on them. While on the road, Mona met many interesting people. There was the vineyard worker, who showed her kindness only to quickly take it away, a farmer, who gave her a chance at a new life only to have it rejected, and a college professor, who is both annoyed and intrigued by Mona’s lifestyle. With these people and their encounters, the mystery, which is Mona, begins to come together, but possibly not in a way anyone thought.

With “Vagabond,” Varda uses this heightened documentary realism to gives us a better understanding of one of the film’s main themes- independence. In Mona, we find a woman who has decided to abandon the working life of an office and reject the secretary degree she was trying to acquire, preferring, instead, to wander outside the confines of normal society and, by doing so, truly live her own life. She is a rebel in the most honest sense of the term, one running from anything that could be mistaken as “settling down.” In one particular scene, she calls herself a “dropout,” and another vagabond quips, “You’re not a dropout…you’re just out.” This states something very interesting about Mona- even those who live on the farthest fringes of society find her an outcast.

Further heightening the audience interest in Mona, Varda begins the film with her death and draws the filmgoers into watching the puzzle of her life come together through interviews with those who knew her, much in the vein of, as Varda admits, Orson Welles’ classic “Citizen Kane.” “If you tell the story of “Citizen Kane,” Varda once said, “it’s not much of a story. An old rich mogul man is dead. He said a word we don’t understand. We don’t discover so much, just some pieces of his life and finally it is just a sled. Is that a story? It is not much. So what makes “Citizen Kane” so interesting is the way we are told about the man—intriguing us about what people think about him.”

A film who’s influence can be clearly seen in several contemporary films, Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild” especially, “Vagabond” continues to be an intriguing character study on the young rebel archetype and how they try to live in a society that now has no borders.

To learn more about “Vagabond,” check out Criterion’s page here.

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