Reviews of Vagabond
Displaying all 5 reviews
.AGNES.
6Feb11
Around the 80’s many young girls appeared in the streets because they decided to live in freedom.
Vagabond is the story of Mona who has moved to live this way. She’s shown as a person who is determined to live as long as she can survive being free. She has studied, but she doesn’t want to feel slaved by having commodities or by working. She lives without any kind of attachments towards anyone but herself.
Agnes Varda beautifully crafted this movie and even though some say is very depressing, I didn’t get that feeling. This movie was quite impressing because of how someone so different to the persons she encountered, had such an impact in their lives, even though some of these persons found her disgusting, pointless or didn’t understand her ideals.
Vagabond is an example of Cinéma vérité that portrays existentialism issues in a very smart way with an excellent performance by Sandrine Bonnaire. It’s a story of freedom and Dirt just what Varda wanted to film.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
jimmylorunning
15Nov09
The movie presents a character through a series of ellipsis and episodes where you see her complexity fully and you also see how others see her, in a way that says more about those judging her than her. Varda doesn’t linger on anything longer than she has to, so she covers epic material in a short amount of time, giving us insights and clues into her character rather than telling us straight out. It’s a story that you would think of as depressing if you just read the synopsis, but the actual movie isn’t depressing at all. There is no pity here, no sentimentality, no judgement. The main character is a bad-ass and unapologetic about her attitude towards life and she also has fun and joyous moments throughout and if she ends up dead in a ditch it’s because she chose to. Sandrine Bonnaire was beautiful and amazing. The scenery was beautiful and suggestive. Favorite scene is the one where she hangs out with that old woman.
I disagree with the reviewer JUNG JI SUNG. I found Mona to be completely loveable, an amazing person really. Actually, I don’t see how you could not love her while watching this, but I guess different strokes for different folks.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
Teddy Cheong
25Apr09
It’s not that I didn’t like this film, but rather, the character Mona. You’ll be hard-pressed to find anything redeeming about her and it’s difficult to care about what happens to a person like that. But I don’t think Varda wants you to particularly care for her. The movie itself is well made and the narrative disturbingly echoes true events of a young man named Chris McCandless (Into the Wild); and, at least in terms of the book, it’s even told in a similar fashion.
- Currently 2.0/5 Stars.
Steve Cohn
28Mar09
A young woman is found in a dead in a ditch. Her face is ashen and her body is half frozen. The police come to investigate. She is covered with raw grape juice. The rest of the film is the story of how she got there, told in a series of vignettes. These stories are punctuated by narrative from the people she met along the way, who recount to others what their experiences with her were like.
Her name was Mona. She was in her mid 20s. She was a hitchhiker who slept outdoors in tents and in ruined buildings, living free from the shackles of society. She smoked weed, drank to excess, had sex with random men, picked up odd jobs and most frequently loafed. When offered opportunities to improve her life, she found reasons to sabotage them. She was always tough and crude… always ready with a “fuck you” for anyone who displeased her. She lied, cheated, stole, manipulated to get by… totally ungrateful and little feeling for others.
The more we follow her, the darker her journey becomes. Is she free? Or is she a slave to her own freedom?
On view in Vagabond are Varda’s gifts for combining non-linear fiction narrative and a documentary feel. Like Cleo from 5 to 7, Vagabond features a three-dimensional female lead faced with her mortality. Like her documentary The Gleaners and I, Vagabond depicts the extreme poverty of those who live off the land. In this sense, the film is no departure from Varda’s greater oeuvre. What makes Vagabond a stunning achievement is that Varda is not only able to combine all of her talents at once, but uses them to tell the story of a nihilist anti hero about whom no one cared… least of all herself. Yet WE care about her. We feel for her. Deeply.
Maicol Andrés Ordoñez
4Mar09
Every once in a while there is a work of art or a magnificent person that twirls my noodles around and changes my perspective on things. As much in my lifestyle as in my way of making films.
Agnes Varda and her film have done this for me.
This movie is profoundly affecting. It is a brilliant antidote to the adolescent fixation on so-called freedom that the ‘beats’ and all sorts of other road poet literature have seduced us with. Take Sean Penn’s INTO THE WILD. The kid in that movie is a rebel heart and he takes to nature like some kinda Jack London. Sure, we see all the warning signs that tell us that something is wrong with this voyage but Penn’s style makes Alexander Supertramps story so rock n’ roll that even when he reached his final discovery (life is better when shared with others or something to that effect)the audience is led to believe that he HAD to take that road to achieve any sort of self-discovery. Hey, it may be true but not all of us are mad road poets. And Penn ignores an inherent mental incapacity in a man who’s willing to believe that giving everything up to starve and die is something heroic. Though it’s surely brave.
In VAGABOND our rebel heart is a filthy creature in mind and body. It’s easy for the people who meet her to be repulsed and also remain in complete awe of her because it’s beautiful to think that absolute “freedom” is something worth pursuing. We wish we were sociopaths: as much as vagabonds as we would like to be high school teacher super spy serial killers on weekends. We want to live outside society and the law, we want to work outside the paradigm of our civilization, and we think that by simply attaching non-violence to rebellion that we’ll be happy. Sorry to say that Kerouac drank himself to death, McCandles died sans epiphany and surely in pain, and that ultimately beyond the page or screen there is no poetry to complete mental isolation.
A man in the film is a philosopher and yet he lives in a ramshackle barn with hundreds of goats taking care of his wife and kid. All of his education and his life’s contemplation has led him to understand that life in model civilization doesn’t have to be the same for all since our expectations from life are different. Through his understanding he reasons that Mona the vagabond’s journey isn’t anything more than withering. “She is working to support a system that she rebels against.”
The confusion of life is enough to suffer through. We live in a society where we feel we’ve had a loss of dignity or of special significance and that we’re in some form slaves. This is all on one very palpable angle. True or not. Yet we are not being murdered in mass numbers, we are not being infected with disease, we are not told what to read or not read by force. What censors we have in our life is a desperate media and a frightened federal system that are weak and simple to ignore. We have the privilege to overcome them and by “rejecting” them through poorly thought out self-destruction we allow them to thrive and fester. Remember, outside and inside the confines of civilization we are allowed to love freely. We can’t ignore that human feeling because without it we are lost. In modern society… the vagabond is traveling sickness.
VAGABOND like the recent WENDY AND LUCY are enough to make one think.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.