Vagabond (1985)

Most films about drifters are about men or boys who look for an escape, or who want to find a more free way to live. Agnes Varda's Vagabond is also about an outsider who does not want to settle down, who wants to be independent and free. But in contrast to the tradition of men who seeks to carve out a life in which they settle the conditions, Varda's film is far, far bleaker. The main character is a young woman - one of the harders characters I've seen on film. 'Hard' in a sense I cannot really decide on myself - is she world-weary, is she tough, has she hardened herself? She seems stubborn, but also fragile. Varda leaves all of this quite open, I think; the drifter remains something of a mystery. It is difficult to see what kind of person she is.

It is a simple film, consisting of several encounters between the main character, the drifter, and the people she meets on the road. The film's own harshness (including its wintry, rural landscapes) sometimes makes me think of Bresson. The film plays out as a quest to understand the young woman, and what happened to her. But there is no resolution here, no safe psychological explanations. There are just a few tableux, and we have to connect them and interpret them ourselves. The only thing we know is that she used to work in an office, but now she begs for money, or works on farms for food and shelter. We see her through the eyes of those who meet her. The documentary-like style, however, creates no false pretense at 'real story' (even the voice-over does not do that, the effect is rather the opposite, somehow). Thinking again of Bresson, what 'reality' is here must be defined in other, more existential, terms.

The encounters between the drifters and the people she meets are often a bit disturbing. There are the kind farmers that give her a trailer and some food - but she refuses to participate in their chores. This brings me back to the hardness. There is an air of refusal in her, of resisting something, of detaching. We see her with a professor who takes an interest in her. There is perhaps some erotic tension there. But she moves on, and as the film progresses, her life moves from carefree to miserable. She slides from a state that I would already call detached to a coma-like existence. Varda follows this downfall without sentimentality; we are all the time drawn into the drifter's world, but not directly, rather from the outside, from the perspective of those who meet her. We see her through people's anger, repulsion, attraction. People project their own needs onto her, and she is mostly a blank surface - sometimes playing along, sometimes being silent, stubborn. People feel rejected by her, but also tantalized by her absence-presence, her strange defiance.

Sandrine Bonnaire is marvellous as the mysterious drifter.