Vagabond (1985 film)

Vagabond
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Agnès Varda
Written by	Agnès Varda
Produced by	Oury Milshtein
Starring	Sandrine Bonnaire Macha Méril Stéphane Freiss Yolande Moreau
Cinematography	Patrick Blossier
Edited by	Agnès Varda Patricia Mazuy
Music by	Joanna Bruzdowicz
Distributed by	MK2 Diffusion
Release dates	September 1985 (1985-09) (Venice) 4 December 1985 (1985-12-04)
Running time	105 minutes
Country	France
Language	French
Box office	$8.1 million

Vagabond (French: Sans toit ni loi, literally "without roof or law") 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.

Cast

• Sandrine Bonnaire as Mona Bergeron
• Macha Méril as Madame Landier, a plane tree specialist
• Stéphane Freiss as Jean-Pierre, an agronomist
• Yolande Moreau as Yolande, Lydie's maid
• Patrick Lepcynski as David, "the wandering Jew"
• Yahiaoui Assouna as Assoun, a vine pruner
• Joël Fosse as Paulo, Yolande's boyfriend
• Marthe Jarnias as Lydie, Jean-Pierre's aunt
• Laurence Cortadellas as Eliane, Jean-Pierre's wife
• Patrick Schmit as the truck driver
• Daniel Bos as the demolition worker
• Katy Champaud as the girl at the water pump
• Pierre Imbert as the mechanic
• Richard Imbert as the mechanic's son
• Gabriel Mariani as Aimé Bionnet, Yolande's uncle
• Sylvain and Sabine as the goat farmers
• Emmanuel Protopopoff as the backpacker blood donor
• "Garibaldi" Fernández as the mason with the round hat
• Aimée Chisci as the manager of Assoun's farm
• Christian Chessa as Mac, a homeless youth at the train station
• Setina Arhab as a homeless youth at the train station
• Jacques Berthier as the well-dressed little man at the train station
• Bébert Samcir as the harmonica player

Title

The film's original French title, Sans toit ni loi ("without roof or law"), is a play on a common French idiom, "sans foi ni loi" ("with neither faith nor law"). It also puns on sans toi ("without you").

Style

Vagabond combines straightforward narrative scenes, in which we see Mona living her life, with pseudo-documentary sequences in which people who knew Mona turn to the camera and say what they remember about her. Significant events are sometimes left unshown, so that the viewer must piece information together to gain the full picture. It was filmed in the departments of Gard, Hérault, and Bouches-du-Rhône.

Critical reception

The film was acclaimed by critics. Roger Ebert gave it four stars out of four, writing: "like so many of the greatest films, it tells us a very specific story, strong and unadorned, about a very particular person". On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of 25 critics' reviews of Vagabond are positive.

Awards and nominations

Award	Category	Name	Outcome
César Awards	Best Film	Agnès Varda	Nominated
	Best Director	Agnès Varda	Nominated
	Best Actress	Sandrine Bonnaire	Won
	Best Supporting Actress	Macha Méril	Nominated
French Syndicate of Cinema Critics	Best Film	Agnès Varda	Won
Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards	Best Foreign Film	Agnès Varda	Won
	Best Actress	Sandrine Bonnaire	Won
National Society of Film Critics Awards	Best Actress	Sandrine Bonnaire	Nominated
New York Film Critics Circle Awards	Best Foreign Language Film	Agnès Varda	Nominated
Sant Jordi Awards	Best Foreign Actress	Sandrine Bonnaire	Won
Venice Film Festival	Golden Lion	Agnès Varda	Won
	Volpi Cup for Best Actress	Sandrine Bonnaire	—
	FIPRESCI Prize	Agnès Varda	Won
	OCIC Award	Agnès Varda	Won

External links

• Vagabond at IMDb
• Vagabond at the TCM Movie Database
• Vagabond at Rotten Tomatoes
• Vagabond an essay by Sandy Flitterman-Lewis at the Criterion Collection