Movie Review – Vagabond

Vagabond (1985)
Written and directed by Agnes Varda

It seems easy for so many to demonize the vulnerable. That’s one of the most upsetting things about humanity for me, to see & hear people refer to subgroups of their fellow human beings as animals. One group in America that is treated in such a way through legislation & everyday rhetoric is the homeless. There are myriad reasons why a person might end up living on the streets. In the West, we still fail to treat the mentally disabled with respect & dignity. The average worker lives in constant peril that each paycheck might be their last. Queer & trans youth are routinely kicked out of their homes by parents whose brains have been inundated with the most hateful propaganda. When I see videos on TikTok of fellow teachers disparaging young people for being disengaged in what they are being taught, I feel like the speakers are missing the point. This is a society that has no intent of ever helping you and would instead grind us into bone meal. If you do not submit your life wholly to the capitalist game, then the ones who are too frightened to ever break away happily piss on your grave. 

Vagabond begins with our central character dead. It’s no spoiler. Within seconds, we see Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) lifeless in a ditch caked with mud. This makes the rest of the film a series of flashback vignettes told from the perspective of people Mona encountered, sometimes more than once. With this structure, we’re piecing together an incomplete image of this young woman and never getting answers to the most pressing questions. The answers to those questions shouldn’t matter in the end. Like the people whose lives intersected with hers briefly, we will walk out of the theater still wondering what she was after. There’s a hint of what it might be, but because these conversations were so brief, we can only ever know fragments. 

Agnes Varda makes liberal use of the tracking shot in this picture. We often think of cinematography as visual flourishes included for style’s sake. However, Varda is on record as saying these tracking shots were directly interlinked with the themes she was exploring. These shots are sometimes racing to catch up with Mona. Other times, they pan right past her and come to a stop, focused on a piece of abandoned farm equipment. Their purpose is to simulate the way society contemplates Mona. Sometimes, we are curious but lose interest quickly; other times, we couldn’t care less about the homeless person we see on our way to our important stops. 

There was an eight-year gap between Varda’s last narrative film, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, and this film. During that gap, she focused on the documentary form and tried to arrange for an American film like her partner Jacques Demy had with Model Shop. It wasn’t to be, so she returned to France to take pictures. We can see the influence of the documentary in Vagabond with its variety of interview styles. Keeping with the overarching narrative, we have some who encountered Mona speaking to a police officer who stands off-screen or with his back to the audience. Others talk directly to the camera about their brief meeting with the young woman. 

I found Varda’s structural choices to put Vagabond in the same camp as pictures like Citizen Kane or Rashomon. These are character studies told through reflection. What has happened has happened, and there is little plot that unfolds over the runtime. Instead, we’re given a box of puzzle pieces intended to come together as a whole person. Yet, upon completing the puzzle, we notice significant gaps, pieces missing by intent. Varda asks us if we must know every aspect of a person’s life to afford them the basic dignity all humans deserve.

Mona is not a pleasant person. She shrugs off the expectations laid out for people, especially women. She is dirty, she smells bad, and she can have a horrible attitude. Does that mean she doesn’t deserve to be treated with respect? Mona is an easy character for many to discount: she’s a woman, she’s young, and she’s not complying with the narrow way forward given to people within her social class. Some people view her as an object to be exploited for their own pleasure. Others think they can elevate their intellectual bonafides by being kind to this wretch while never really showing any curiosity as to who she really is. 

The most telling encounter for me is between Mona and the philosopher-turned-goat farmer. Of all the people she encounters, it could be argued that he is the kindest, yet even his time with her ends in argument. The farmer gives her a trailer on his land and a plot of land to grow her own food. Mona quickly becomes bored and says she won’t farm the land. His generation was the idealistic hippies, the principled rejectors of the dominant socio-economic structure. Mona’s generation is not rebelling similarly; she pushes back non-ideologically. This stuns the farmer because all his choices have been attached to some belief system, while Mona just doesn’t want to participate in anything; she wants to exist for however long she can make it last.

Varda is not a director to make bold judgments about her characters. What I can infer from this juxtaposition is an observation that the rebellious in the wake of the 1960s are divorced from the idea of collective struggle. It shouldn’t surprise us; the societies we live in now are even more intensely hyper-individualistic. We are conditioned less & less to think of our neighbors and community as people who care about each other. Mona can feel in her bones that the way of life being pushed upon her is dissonant with the tune she carries inside. However, nothing exists to guide her into a new life besides dropping out. The goat farmer has come along too late in her life to really have much influence on Mona’s choices. 

The type of rebellion Mona engages in makes complete sense in contemplating the hierarchies she came out of. Solidarity is routinely discouraged, so why should anyone expect that it could be found here? The rebellions of the 1980s were ones hidden away, quickly forgotten. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have meaning or that we cannot learn anything from a life like Mona’s. I don’t even think the character could articulate what she felt inside. All she could do was act on these feelings. The gaps in understanding who she is do not inform us about her; they speak of a society routinely disinterested in the people who compose it. We dedicate our lives to institutions, and a brief survey of social media shows how rabidly so many defend faceless systems of power that do not give a flying fuck about them. I don’t think I would choose Mona’s life, but I have a solid understanding of why she would choose to live how she did.