I went to see Agnes Varda’s classic film Vagabond (1985) at the Moving Image museum. I hadn’t seen it in nearly twenty years, and found it to be poignant and rough to watch. It’s about a young teen female drifter who is found dead from cold in a ditch, and an unseen fictional interviewer collects on-camera recollections from people she met along her journey, with a series of vignettes about her life hitchhiking, doing odd jobs for money and small random meals, smoking grass with a short-lived beau, befriending a businesswoman during a car ride, sleeping in a tent in the woods, etc. The girl, named Mona, can be quite charming, like when she gets drunk on brandy with a rich old lady, or makes lame puns like “bread for some bread.” She is a pretty intelligent and streetwise character, who pretty much just goes where the road takes her.
The film largely takes place in the French countryside, and it is compelling to watch Mona go along her way and collecting experiences, being transient. I likely romanticized this film in my late teens, but didn’t pay close attention to the negative sides of her vagabond life as a solo teen girl, like when she gets raped in the woods (the camera pans away and cuts to another scene), gets wasted with a group of homeless vagrants in a dirty flophouse, or acts like a drunk, desperate mess in a bus station.
It was good to revisit this film and have an adult perspective on it, of both having admiration and sympathy for Mona, and wanting her to settle somewhere or to have more safety in her life while still being a free spirited person.
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