“And look, it’s not that I don’t know about the world, the disgusting world — the news on television, the news in the papers, the messages of hate, the separations between religions and between countries, the horrible experiences of migrants all over the world. But I don’t want to add another layer of drama, another layer of terrifying life. I really wish to be on the side of a daydream, of utopia. I want to be on the side of the question: Could art help people? Could cinema help people think about their lives?”
—Varda interviewed in the LA Times, 2017
The first Agnès Varda film I ever saw was 1985’s Vagabond. When I did, I experienced that selfish feeling our favorite works of art can give us: that somehow its maker had created it especially for me. I had never connected with movies the way I did with books; when exploring the film canon, it was hard to find my way around intransigent hordes of male auteurs. I had barely begun my conscious effort to locate the archives of women-made classics when I stumbled upon Vagabond at my then-thriving neighborhood video store. Suddenly, here was a director, and an unusually wise one, not posturing for anyone, but holding an unstinting, comradely gaze.
I delved deeper into movies; eventually I began to frequent a film-geek site. A photo of Vagabond’s protagonist Mona became my avatar there: a shot of the incomparable Sandrine Bonnaire chomping grimly on an apple she holds in grimy fingerless gloves, with the highway habitat stretched out behind her. Where hitchhikers are concerned, she shares less with Barbara Loden’s escaped housewife in Wanda than the Alaska-bound lesbians who steal Five Easy Pieces: moving because it beats staying still. When Sal and Dean hit the road, did anyone ask what was wrong with them? Behind the camera, Varda watches not in judgment, but in fascination. Time and again, I watched her approach her subjects as collaborators in the acts of creating and living in an often-indifferent society.
I am always struck by Varda’s refusal, even in interviews and commentaries, of set conclusions and master narratives. She envisioned her characters as individuals with the capacity to think, choose and surprise, people whose life stories she didn’t presume to know. She liked to refer to her process as cinécriture, or writing with film: using her directorial, photographic and editorial choices to tell stories, while treating chance as her writing partner.
Like other figures from Varda’s repertoire, many of the people Vagabond’s Mona encounters on her wanderings are non-actors: the soulful migrant...
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