Vagabond (1985)
Directed by Agnès Varda
Mona Bergeron is dead, her frozen body found in a ditch in the French countryside. From this, the film flashes back to the weeks leading up to her death. Through these flashbacks, Mona gradually declines as she travels from place to place, taking odd jobs and staying with whomever will offer her a place to sleep. Mona is fiercely independent, craving freedom over comfort, but it is this desire to be free that will eventually lead to her demise.
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What critics compared Vagabond to
But it benefits from Zhao’s instinctive curiosity and identification with outsiders, reminiscent of French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who turned her empathetic camera on vagabonds and gleaners in her innovative docu-fiction features (the French title of “Vagabond,” which translates to “With no roof or rules,” could be a nomad mantra).
Agnes Varda’s 1985 Vagabond (Sans toi ni loi ) was about a female transient wandering the backroads of France.
Still, the philosophical feminist precedent to beat is still Agnès Varda’s chilling, scorchingly defiant Vagabond (1985), which limns an antisocial odyssey to the edge of extinction without resorting to semi-porn.
Without doubt, this is Western cinema 's most mature and assured performance by a teenage actress since Sandrine Bonnaire 's award-winning work in "A Nos Amours" and "Vagabond" 30 years ago.
In her we can see a bit of Sandrine Bonnaire's defiant female drifter in Agnès Varda's Vagabond, as well as the passive, inward-bending body language of the young "models" in Robert Bresson's later films, weakly struggling against their fate.
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See it at the Roxie, where it opened Jan. 10 and continues this week, and then go and check out her masterpieces, like “Cleo from 5 to 7,” “Vagabond,” “The Gleaners & I,” “The Beaches of Agnes” and “Faces Places.”
This communal storytelling device is similar to, but far more emotionally effective than, the one used in Citizen Kane, in which each interviewee conjectured about the meaning of �Rosebud�.