Vagabond begins with a shot of the French countryside — a peaceful, agrarian image of a farmer plowing his field in the foreground while another man burns sticks in the background. The tranquil scene is soundtracked by a foreboding piece of music from the film’s composer, Joanna Bruzdowicz, and the camera slowly pans in. The first cut of the film gets us closer to the man burning sticks, and we discover why the music was so ominous. The score cuts out as he discovers a hypothermic corpse in a ditch, the body of our protagonist. The film that follows is a sort of autopsy, though there is no grand mystery to uncover. The police inspector at the scene has already concluded that this young woman died of “natural causes.” With the cause of death determined and no one to blame directly, what’s left is the question of who this person was and how she interacted with the world in her final days.
Through voice-over narration from the film’s director, Nouvelle Vague legend Agnés Varda, we learn that the dead woman’s name was Mona Bergeron, and we jump back in time to see her hitching a ride with a trucker. She’s told that the area she’s traveling through is a tourist destination that’s significantly more populated during the summer. Mona does the math and notes that there must be at least 87,000 empty beds. It’s easy to take this statement as a directorial condemnation of greed in the face of human destitution and misery and that’s part of it for sure. Some quick Google math tells me that there are approximately 15.1 million vacant homes in the US right now and around 771,480 people experiencing some level of homelessness. But Vagabond is not a didactic moral screed nor a film that offers easy answers.
As the film continues, we begin to meet people who had significant encounters with Mona in her final days. Some of them treat her cruelly, but many of them try to help her in some way. Varda, who was a very accomplished documentarian, uses documentary-style techniques in her storytelling, with characters addressing the camera directly at times and speaking of the effect that Mona had on them and their lives. The film becomes a portrait of a community through the framework of this tragic story. We learn about each of them in how they interact with Mona and see glimpses of their various lives and worldviews, their struggles and their foibles. Though each character has obvious flaws, Varda, always the humanist, paints them with empathy and compassion. Mona herself gets the same treatment. We quickly learn that she has her own moral failings and is far from our ideal of the perfect sympathetic victim. She can be selfish and cruel, ungrateful and lazy. She both does and does not want to be saved.
In the 2003 featurette Vagabond: Remembrances, Interviews, Notes and Comments that Varda made for a rerelease of the film, she talks about how the main character being a woman was essential to the story. Female vagrants had been a rare sight in the past and were just becoming more commonplace. Though lead actress Sandrine Bonnaire, who was 17 when the film was made and won a César for her performance, is clearly beautiful, the film continually emphasizes how filthy and smelly she is, with Varda doing everything short of adding cartoon stink lines in post. Her youth and innate beauty may make her more sympathetic at times, but her failure to conform to societal standards of cleanliness and demure femininity make her an object of derision and a target of sexual violence.
The two core dichotomies presented in the film, the two we’re told that Mona struggled with, are loneliness versus freedom and wandering versus withering. The first is easy to understand. Everyone gets sick of their job and their responsibilities. Everyone longs for autonomy and yearns to escape the drudgery of daily life. But conversely, human beings are social animals, and we belong in community. We’re made to work and create and care for each other. The other dichotomy is a bit more conceptual, but it’s essentially the same question. How can you escape and explore without cutting yourself off from the human vine that offers life and meaning? How can you be an individual and find your unique purpose within the greater human organism? Is it selfish to even try?
If there’s a single moral to be gleaned from Vagabond, it’s the same lesson you’ll find in all of Varda’s films to some extent. She’s perhaps best remembered for her boundless curiosity. Agnés spent months exploring the area where Vagabond is filmed and met real-life vagrants, whose stories informed the writing of the film. She cast several non-actors who played versions of themselves and often expressed their true thoughts. Even though Vagabond mostly lacks the playfulness that you typically find in Varda’s documentaries, it’s clear that she found human beings endlessly fascinating. Whether she was pointing her camera at artists and revolutionaries, or farmers and shopkeepers, she exuded warmth and empathy. There’s a spark of the divine in all of us and each and every discarded person deserves to be known and loved. — Sam Williams (2026)
Arts & Faith Lists: