Vagabond (1985, Agnès Varda) (Patreon)

64/100

Second viewing, last seen 1997. Having since become well acquainted with Varda as a person (or at least with the self-image she cultivated in her golden-years docs), I almost find it hard to believe that she made such a brutally unsentimental portrait of homelessness, however voluntary Mona's decision to walk the earth like Caine in Kung Fu may have been. Despite showing us this tough-but-fragile young woman's sad fate right off the bat, the film rarely feels as if it's demanding our pity (my dramaturgical bête noire); Mona often behaves quite obnoxiously, alienating people, like the hippy farmers, who are genuinely trying to help her. When allied with a fellow outcast, on the other hand—including, in a nicely shrewd contrast, the rich old lady whose family is impatiently waiting for her to die—she can be kind and empathetic. Bonnaire turns in one of those miraculous debut performances in which actor and role seem inseparable (it took me until about now to finally register Émilie Dequenne as anyone other than Rosetta), getting the prickly-to-needy ratio exactly right and creating a character multifaceted enough to merit the varying descriptions of her provided throughout in direct-to-camera testimonials. I'd have liked those pseudo-doc interludes to function as more of an organizing principle than they do...though, at the same time, I find some of Varda's specific juxtapositions heavy-handed, e.g. cutting from Mona being assaulted in the woods to the male farmer (whose segment of the film was like half an hour earlier) griping about her ingratitude. On balance, though, Vagabond is too forthright and too discursive to come across as didactic. Many films have been made about the trials and tribulations of indigent wanderers, but few provide so much fascinating information about tree-killing fungi accidentally imported via U.S. weapons crates during World War II.