Vagabond by Agnès Varda (1985)

One winter morning in the south of France a farm worker discovers a young women’s filthy body in a ditch.  She has apparently frozen to death during the preceding night.  In voice-over a woman narrator who is most likely the filmmaker explains to us that the body, which no one has come to claim, was buried in a pauper’s grave.  She is interested in this young woman, whose name is Mona Bergeron, and is trying to learn as much as she can about her by talking to the people she met during the last weeks of her life, which she had spent roaming around the Nîmes region.  The film consists largely of these peoples’ memories of Mona, which are often presented as flashbacks.  Their testimony —in front of the camera or filmed without their knowledge — is interspersed with the young woman’s wanderings.

At the beginning of the film Mona walks out of the sea naked.  Two suspicious characters on a motorcycle watch her from afar while she gets dressed, but they eventually leave.  They will be the first two witnesses, followed by a truck driver who gave Mona a ride (but made her get out when she became obnoxious) and a worker who discovered her sleeping in an old shack that they were destroying.  Mona knocks on the door of a house to ask for water, then at another door to ask for some matches.  She smokes non-stop.  The daughter of the family in the first house is envious of Mona and would like to be “free” like her.  She is awakened the next morning by a gravedigger; she had put up her tent in a cemetery.  Having only stale bread to eat, she accepts a sandwich in a café, then sets off down the road again.  She hides when a police car passes.  She finds work in a garage, where she washes cars, and then puts up her tent behind the service station and just lazes away the rest of the day.  The owner speaks to us about her, saying that he didn’t trust her (but we see him coming out of her tent pulling his pants up early in the morning…).

Facing the camera, Yolande the maid gives her testimony.  She noticed the young woman in the castle where her uncle worked as a caretaker, asleep in the embrace of a young man.  She envies them and would like to have the same kind of romantic relationship with her boy friend Paulo, who clearly has no feelings for her.  Mona enjoys an idyllic existence at the castle with another vagabond David, who refers to himself as “The Wandering Jew.”  They spend each day smoking marijuana, drinking wine, and making love.  The idyll comes to an end abruptly when Paulo and his friends come to burglarize the castle one night and beat David up in the process.  David offers his testimony on Mona, expressing his disappointment at her hurried departure when the burglars arrived.

Mona continues her wandering, then finds refuge with some aging hippies turned shepherds (a former philosophy student and his partner) who agree to take her in.  However, finding it hard to tolerate her laziness and slovenliness, they soon force her to leave.  She steals a few goat cheeses from the shepherds and sells them to a prostitute working the highway.

The film is dominated for a long while by the testimony of Madame Landier, a university professor specializing in the diseases of plane trees, who picks up Mona as she hitchhikes.  Before we see the episode as a flashback, she relates the incident over the telephone to a friend, expressing astonishment at how bad the young woman smelled.  She feeds Mona, explains her work to her, and lets her sleep in her car overnight.  The next day she takes her to a place where she is studying some diseased trees and introduces her to a co-worker named Jean-Pierre, an agricultural engineer.  We then see Jean-Pierre with his wife Eliane, who has set her sights on the apartment of her husband’s great aunt Lydie.  Eliane could care less about the young vagrant her husband describes to her.

We catch up with Mona in a Red Cross trailer where she is giving blood before hitting the road again.  She finds a job loading crates onto a truck.  Jean-Pierre arrives at Mme Landier’s home just in time to save her from electrocution.  Mme Landier is worried about Mona, who disappeared into the woods when she let her out of her car.           Indeed, in the following episode Mona, who was camping out in the woods, is raped by a man who has stalked her.

In the following episode Mona is taken in by Assoun, a Tunisian vineyard worker whose lodgings and work she shares until the other workers, Moroccans, return and refuse to let her stay with them.  Yolande picks her up next and puts her in a bedroom in Jean-Pierre’s old aunt’s apartment, where she is employed as a maid.  Mona strikes up a friendly relationship with the old woman and gives her alcohol; the two of them get drunk together and break into uncontrollable laughter.  Yolande returns and ejects Mona from the apartment (giving her some money) but is then kicked out herself at the insistence of Eliane.  The police suspect her boyfriend Paulo of participating in a burglary of the castle where her uncle is caretaker.

We next find Mona with a group of dropouts, young drug addicts who have become derelicts.  They spend their days at the train station and their nights squatting in an abandoned building.  We receive the testimony of Jean-Pierre, who is horrified when he sees the young woman in an awful state as he is accompanying Yolande to her train.  David “The Wandering Jew” arrives at the building where the group is squatting and gets into a fight with another vagrant over some money.  They manage to set the building on fire, forcing Mona to leave.  One of the dropouts speaks about Mona as he faces the camera.  He is sorry about her departure: he would have liked to become her pimp.

Mona is now outdoors in the freezing weather.  She tries to sleep in a large radish greenhouse with a plastic top, but she is too cold.  The next day she is attacked and smeared with wine dregs by merrymakers celebrating a wine festival in a village where she had gone in search of bread.  Terrified, she takes refuge in a telephone booth, then runs away.  We see her finally in the middle of a vineyard covered with a filthy blanket, dragging her feet in boots which are falling apart at the seams.  She walks across the vineyard, stumbles, and falls forward into a ditch.  She tries to get up but falls on her back and lies still.  Fade to black.