There is something undeniably fascinating about the traveling loner – a person untethered to any relationship beyond their own survival. Agnès Varda’s mid-Eighties French drama Vagabond presents such a case, a young homeless woman drifting through rural France on the often limited kindness of strangers. Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) is to other characters across the film’s scant 105 minutes a lover, a thief, and a tragedy. What she is to herself, we are never privy to, and the movie conspires with her to keep everyone at arm’s length. A complicated narrative led by a complicated protagonist, this is a movie worth watching more than once over its multi-day run at AFS. – James Scott
