Vagabond

A young woman, a vagrant, is found frozen to death in a ditch. Who is she? Where is she from? Where was she going? In Agnes Varda's 1985 film Vagabond, these answers are not easily forthcoming. As played by Sandrine Bonnaire, the young woman seems to have come out of thin air, or perhaps it's the sea.

We do know her name, it is Mona Bergeron. She is a drifter, going from place to place, "camping," as she calls it, although she is really homeless. It is winter, and she sometimes sleeps outside in a tent, but will crash with a kind person (or sometimes will squat in an otherwise abandoned house). She likes cigarettes, occasionally has sex with other drifters, and is not a particularly happy person.

Does she have a family? We can assume so. She says she was in secretarial school when she took off, but who knows if what she says is the truth. She is defiant, and unsentimental.

The homeless are an issue in almost every Western nation, and when we see someone and think about it we may wonder what their story is. When it's a young person, we might assume a runaway, mental illness, drugs. Mona does not seem to do drugs--she sometimes gives blood for money, which a heroin addict couldn't do. She is also not working as a prostitute--at one point, an actual streetwalker chases her away, saying the sight of her will lose business. Though film is not a medium for smell, we are told several  times that she reeks, and by the clothes she wears we can almost smell it.

This is a difficult film to watch. For one, we know she comes to a bad end, as the first image is of her corpse. Varda does not give us a wrapped-up explanation, such as her being "misunderstood," or any other tidy reason. She does give her a bit of mythology, though. The first time we see Mona, she is naked, emerging from the sea, like Aphrodite.

I've got a few more Varda films to see, but of her narrative films Vagabond is her strongest.