On the Road Vagabond

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Mona, if that is her real name, is a woman in her late teens wandering the south of France. But she is no ordinary postadolescent backpacker, for the season is bone-chilling winter, and she is not on a voyage of self-discovery prior to beginning graduate school. She has no home, no friends and no history she cares to discuss--even with herself. Her thoughts are focused on such basic matters as food and shelter.

Agnes Varda's remarkable film Vagabond begins with Mona's end (she is found frozen to death in a ditch) and then recounts the last months of her life through a series of recollections by the people she met on her lonesome road, all of whose insights into her character or motives are banal. The director's style is as bleakly austere as her subject's life. Varda's camera is nearly always at an objectifying distance from Mona, her editing as abrupt as the small changes in the journey's rhythm (here a spot of comfort, there a moment of near unconscious cruelty). She avoids large explanations of Mona's fate, and any implication that political reform or therapeutic intervention might have saved her. And though Varda is clearly influenced by existential and modernist ideas, there is no overt reference to them either.

Yet one is curiously moved by this harsh film, not least because of Sandrine Bonnaire's astonishing performance as Mona. She personifies youth gripped by a self-destructive ideal (in this case radical individualism), but she projects it without petulance or self-pity. She--and the film--insists only on the unknowability of another human being's choices. We are free to decide if that point is irrelevant to us or tragedy enough to explain, if not life in general, then this particular death. -- R.S.