Vagabond

This is only my second proper Varda film: I've only watched her documentary on her late husband (director Jacques Demy), JACQUOT DE NANTES (1991) and her ode to nickelodeon days ONE HUNDRED AND ONE NIGHTS OF SIMON CINEMA (1995); I do have 4 more titles by her on VHS but, alas, only in French i.e. with no English subtitles!

Despite being past her vintage, this is a remarkable piece of work: affecting but unsentimental, vivid rather than depressing. It deals with the last few days of a vagrant girl (a member of the working-class who got fed up with her vapid lifestyle and decided to find herself again 'on the road'), played with candor and great passion by Sandrine Bonnaire - a deserving Cesar Award recipient (the film itself emerged triumphant at Cannes). Still, the film doesn't romanticize her existence at all - the rejections and abuses she suffers throughout her journey, the abject poverty, the bitter cold, indeed her entire unwholesome environment - and, in fact, has all the air of being a story gleaned from the headlines (fittingly given a cine-verite' approach by Varda, providing intermittent interrogations by the police of the people who saw her last and one particular character addressing the audience directly at several stages during the film!).

Necessarily episodic in nature, the film does goes on a tad too long (especially the interlude with the Arabic immigrant, who actually plays himself!) but it basically covers the gamut of emotions, while also containing an unexpected - but most welcome - spurt of irreverence in the scenes involving a senile rich old lady, the messy (and vaguely Surrealist) Wine Festival towards the very end, and extending even to the droll final credit roll! Like a number of their early releases, the Criterion DVD is unfortunately bare-bones.