Its 18-Year-Old Star Gives a ‘Ferocious’ Performance in a Film That Risks Everything

As we watch, Mona Bergeron, the young vagabond of Agnes Varda’s fine, haunting film, seems to come from the sea like some full-breasted goddess. Although it is cold enough to see one’s breath on this South of France seacoast, she walks naked out of the ocean, with a lioness’ stride.

It’s not our first glimpse of her. As “Vagabond” (at the Fine Arts) opens, the camera moves delicately, past a tree framing a grape field, across an irrigation ditch, to find Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), face up and dead of the cold, her blue-jeaned body at an awkward angle, her smooth brow broad as the death mask of Keats.

“Vagabond” goes back to trace her crisscrossing path during her last months, through towns, cafes, railroad stations, forests and even a decrepit chateau: glimpses of Mona as remembered by the dozen or more who came in contact with her. Gravely intelligent and unsentimental, “Vagabond” questions the meaning and the price of independence with a passion that won it “Best Film” at Venice last year, and its 18-year-old actress the Cesar, the French equivalent of the Oscar.

Writer-director Varda dares everything in “Vagabond” and succeeds. She dares our knowledge of Mona’s death from the very beginning of her story. She dares to make Mona opaque, hostile, “independent” and lazy in equal amounts--yet absolutely compelling. Varda prettifies nothing; the grime-encrusted, reeking Mona would try the humanity of the most decent person who gave her a lift. Only Mona’s great, quick, curving smile breaks her implacably sullen mask, and she finds precious little to smile about.

But with the ferocious performance of Bonnaire as its center, “Vagabond” seizes you and doesn’t let go. Mona is truly haunting; she has chosen her life, not fallen into it willy-nilly. Under the abrasive surface, she’s quick and funny, given to puns as well as hard-bitten judgments. When she lets herself be used cheaply, we feel the erosion of her soul even more than she.

“Vagabond’s” chorus of characters is complex and interrelated enough for Dickens or Balzac: an outgoing, self-satisfied woman of science whose encounter with Mona is shattering; a hateful pair of young French yuppies; a hilarious 84-year-old, the well-off Tante Lydie, and her dim, romantic young maid; a Tunisian migrant worker; assorted cutthroats, con men and denizens of the road.

They enter Mona’s life in a kind of balance. No one person is either wholly good or bad (the pimp/drifter at the railway station may be a notable exception). And, as Varda sees it, there is no action without its counteraction. One man saves a life; the same man callously ignores another in desperate need of saving.

Varda includes nature in this matter of balances as well: The scientist (Macha Meril) with whom Mona spends a few days on the road is part of a group trying to save the great plane trees of France. Now dying, they were infected during World War II when the military equipment of the American GIs was shipped in diseased wooden crates. A country’s freedom has come with an awful price tag; the camera looks stoically at these doomed trees whose cancers seem to bubble out of them.

It is Varda’s evenhandedness, her unjudging presentation, that are at the core of her art. Briefly and disastrously, Mona stays with a hyper-educated goatherd and his tiny family who proudly live off the land. Considering Mona later, he says, “By proving she’s useless, she helps the system she rejects. Wandering? That’s withering.” Absolutely true. But Mona’s retort is on the mark too: If she had his education--he has a master’s in philosophy--she wouldn’t live the way he does. In her eyes, this bearded, granny-glassed goatherd and his wife aren’t “free” but as fettered as any businessman, with far fewer comforts.

Varda pleads no special case for her disintegrating heroine--she is not presented as unloved, unwanted, (previously) abused, a child of divorce, any sort of addict or a felon. She is merely human and universal, and we watch her shift from that lioness’ stride to the flopping, eccentric circles of her last days with terrible pain--and no ready solution.

Bonnaire’s performance is searing and complete. This is the actress discovered at 15 by director Maurice Pialat for his “A Nos Amours.” She was extraordinary then; she is unforgettable now. Only a handful of the 20 or more performers of “Vagabond” are professionals; it is to Varda’s great credit that it’s almost impossible to tell which is which.