Vagabond (1985 film)
Vagabond is a 1985 French drama film written and directed by Agnès Varda and starring Sandrine Bonnaire. Beginning with the discovery of a young female vagabond in a ditch, the film tells—via flashbacks—the story of her last winter, which she spent wandering around the Languedoc-Roussillon wine country.
The film premiered at the 42nd Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion, and was nominated for four César Awards, with Bonnaire winning Best Actress. It was the 36th highest-grossing film of the year in France, with a total of 1,080,143 admissions.
Plot
On a cold winter morning in the vineyards of a small village in the Gard region of France, the contorted body of a young woman, Mona Bergeron, is discovered in a ditch. The local gendarmes quickly determine she is a vagrant who froze to death, and she is buried in a potter's field.Mona's last winter is portrayed through flashbacks initiated by interviews with people who had crossed her path. She wanders the country alone, hitchhiking, sleeping in a tent, and doing odd jobs to survive. She experiences hunger, thirst, cold, dangerous situations, and lack of cigarettes or cannabis. She meets a maid who envies her freedom and has short relationships with another vagabond, a family of goat farmers, a professor specialising in plane trees, a Tunisian vineyard worker, and a group of homeless youths who spend their time drinking, doing drugs, and committing petty crimes at a railway station. She tells one companion that she left her life as a secretary in Paris to seek freedom and life without responsibility.
Mona's boots fall apart, and after she loses her tent and sleeping bag in a fire at a squat in Nîmes, she is left with only a blanket for warmth. She stumbles across a bizarre harvest festival, where she is daubed with wine dregs by men in strange costumes. After escaping, she wanders into a vineyard, where she falls into a ditch. Tired, cold, wet, and now injured, she does not get up, and succumbs to the elements.