Vagabond

Director: Agnès Varda

1985 / 105min / 35mm

Varda’s mid-career highlight subversively applies a posthumous flashback structure, à la Citizen Kane, to the story of a woman who couldn’t be further from blustering world-builder Charles Foster Kane: a drifter, played with hard, impenetrable interiority by Sandrine Bonnaire, found frozen to death in wine country as the film begins, recalled by the various people she encountered in the course of her restless, seemingly aimless journey. Through her intent attention to a life that might be considered meaningless or inconsequential, Varda reminds us of an essential truth—that no human life is either. One of the director’s most withholding works, bordering at times on the Bressonian, and also one of her most moving.