Os Renegados

There are many different reasons to watch a film. I personally enjoy casual get out the six pack of beer type movies and I appreciate sincere great film art. Vagabond is one of the greatest films I have ever seen. I was drawn into this deeply tragic tale from the very opening scene with the wonderful music and cinematography. The documentary style used as a device to tell the story of Mona was bold and very appropriate to convey the depth of the impact this person had on the other characters in the film.

The acting of Ms. Bonnaire convinced me to care about this deeply troubled character and the isolated existential life she led. I personally have met in my own life people living in this way and I am always perplexed that I can not understand what is going on in that person's head. This film is and example of what makes great art. It tells a story that is universal and yet very personal. See this film. (10 out of 10).

You're an outcast, left to fend all on your own, reasons unclear, and only you're the one who knows, wandering the barren lands, in a winter where cold's fanned, on occasion some small morsel might be thrown. The net, that's meant to catch your fall has failed, as you cascade along a lost and lonely trail, folks indifferent to your plight, you're frustrations causing flight, becoming cornered, without wind to catch your sail.

Through an outstanding performance from Sandrine Bonnaire, the late, great Agnès Varda leaves us under no illusion of the cause of a young woman's death during her winter of discontent.

With an antagonizing protagonist who is as doomed as the plane trees in the film...this film could be seen as strictly nihilistic. I recently watched "SherryBaby" and strongly preferred this film which I watched a week prior, and yet I still find myself pondering Sandrine Bonnaire's portrayal of a woman who is stranded.

Indeed "No one makes it alone" could better be the tag line here, and Bonnaire's Mona goes on an odyssey that is nothing short of harrowing. Also trading heroin chic for (self-imposed?) homeless bleak pushed us into less charted filmic waters. Choosing an unknown for the title role was also a good call I suspect. The film is now older than it's lead actress was at the time.

So much of the film talks about how Mona stinks, perhaps smell-a-vision would have helped ;> Honestly her face is still too attractive, although wide and maybe manly in a way, that for me the sense of her scent didn't wash. That being said, her disaffection was on display so well, that you could see her as having a dirty soul. At nearly every chance of being likable she veers to the other direction, the one notable exception for me being her interaction with the "platonologne" (is that like octogenarian, don't know the French...the characters all had interesting descriptions in the credits)..

Additionally, from the English subtitles and snatches of French, I sense the dialog (should I say dialogue) in this was quite cutting and clever in parts.

While Mona lives without roof or law, while she may move without purpose or direction, she is more than a human tumbleweed. She does not live without leaving a trace...but the filmmaker keeps us intentionally distant from her, we are never allowed inside her mental tent. Thus our composite sketch of her is as complex and contradictory as the people she encounters. Not only does Mona live without control over her life, her death as well eludes her.

Viewers may find it less easy to escape.

Thurston Hunger 7/10

This is only my second proper Varda film: I've only watched her documentary on her late husband (director Jacques Demy), JACQUOT DE NANTES (1991) and her ode to nickelodeon days ONE HUNDRED AND ONE NIGHTS OF SIMON CINEMA (1995); I do have 4 more titles by her on VHS but, alas, only in French i.e. with no English subtitles!

Despite being past her vintage, this is a remarkable piece of work: affecting but unsentimental, vivid rather than depressing. It deals with the last few days of a vagrant girl (a member of the working-class who got fed up with her vapid lifestyle and decided to find herself again 'on the road'), played with candor and great passion by Sandrine Bonnaire - a deserving Cesar Award recipient (the film itself emerged triumphant at Cannes). Still, the film doesn't romanticize her existence at all - the rejections and abuses she suffers throughout her journey, the abject poverty, the bitter cold, indeed her entire unwholesome environment - and, in fact, has all the air of being a story gleaned from the headlines (fittingly given a cine-verite' approach by Varda, providing intermittent interrogations by the police of the people who saw her last and one particular character addressing the audience directly at several stages during the film!).

Necessarily episodic in nature, the film does goes on a tad too long (especially the interlude with the Arabic immigrant, who actually plays himself!) but it basically covers the gamut of emotions, while also containing an unexpected - but most welcome - spurt of irreverence in the scenes involving a senile rich old lady, the messy (and vaguely Surrealist) Wine Festival towards the very end, and extending even to the droll final credit roll! Like a number of their early releases, the Criterion DVD is unfortunately bare-bones.

Someone moving through life in a way so counter to the norm, taking the road less traveled and often so vulnerable doing so, is like a mirror held up to humanity. Some react with incredible generosity and try to give her a leg up, and others are harsh or prey on her. To its credit, the film doesn't glamorize this character and frankly she's often hard to like, and yet Varda has a way of bringing out empathy, a big part of which is suspending judgment. It didn't all work for me, like the maid with problems of her own addressing the camera, and it's a bleak tale, but the profoundly deep kindness of the director radiates like a beacon. Sandrine Bonnaire gave a fine performance too.