User reviews

You're an outcast, left to fend all on your own, reasons unclear, and only you're the one who knows, wandering the barren lands, in a winter where cold's fanned, on occasion some small morsel might be thrown. The net, that's meant to catch your fall has failed, as you cascade along a lost and lonely trail, folks indifferent to your plight, you're frustrations causing flight, becoming cornered, without wind to catch your sail.

Through an outstanding performance from Sandrine Bonnaire, the late, great Agnès Varda leaves us under no illusion of the cause of a young woman's death during her winter of discontent.

We know from the very beginning the fate of Sandrine Bonnaire's Mona, the "Vagabond" of the title in Agnes Varda's magnificent film. She's dead, a frozen corpse in a ditch and then, in flashbacks, we see how she got there. Varda never passes judgment and "Vagabond", like her very best films, is a work of observation. As well as a handful of professional actors she uses the people of the towns and villages Bonnaire passes through, giving the film an air of reality while Bonnaire herself is simply superb.

Varda doesn't require her to do anything but exist and it's a very 'un-actressy' performance, closer to real life than to what we are used to seeing in the movies. Now and again the film dips into the conventional as if Varda is trying to put some meat on its bones but for the most part, this is a remarkable work and one of the best of its director's career.

There are many different reasons to watch a film. I personally enjoy casual get out the six pack of beer type movies and I appreciate sincere great film art. Vagabond is one of the greatest films I have ever seen. I was drawn into this deeply tragic tale from the very opening scene with the wonderful music and cinematography. The documentary style used as a device to tell the story of Mona was bold and very appropriate to convey the depth of the impact this person had on the other characters in the film.

The acting of Ms. Bonnaire convinced me to care about this deeply troubled character and the isolated existential life she led. I personally have met in my own life people living in this way and I am always perplexed that I can not understand what is going on in that person's head. This film is and example of what makes great art. It tells a story that is universal and yet very personal. See this film. (10 out of 10).

Perhaps Sandrine Bonnaire's "Mona" represents my greatest fear -- of being alone and broke. That is why she has remained with me for almost twenty years. Remembering the first time I met her is nostalgic to me. I walked the roads of rural France with her and liked her for not begging to be liked. Perhaps it was love more than like. Her journey made me tearful. I mourned the inevitability of her existence.

Such is Agnes Varda's talent that the movie affected me so deeply -- my favourite movie of hers, by the way. The landscapes are so vivid, the dead tree branches so bare yet so brittle in the harsh elements. The compositions possess a fixed, absolute nature that conveys a hopeless destiny. There is no offensive beauty in Mona's destitution, there is merely purity.

Because so few motion pictures resonate with this much intensity and feeling for me, I go through periods in which I feel like I'm wasting my life away seeing so many, but when I consider the alternative, Mona's choices suddenly feel real to me.

Extraordinary in every sense.

Make a gallant effort to see VAGABOND. It will touch you deeply and wake you from the slumber of indifference.

sans toit ni loi ( without a roof nor rule) by Agnes Varda

Visual poetry in films is rarely sublime.Mostly its an interpretation that is fed to us either by the director of the film or some high-faultin critic who manages to see color in sepiated walls.The rare film that manages to transcend leaves you speechless with nothing to say as words fail to capture the essence , beauty and enigma of that film. All you can say is today I was blessed. Like a born again christian or a corpulent evangelist you wish to celebrate your new found faith with words , gestures , anything that says to the director of the film, you gave me a day of absolute completeness today and a film that will forever stay with me like unrequited love. That transcendental, evocative , sensitive , visually dazzling , transcendence is sans toit ni loi by agnes Varda. The film as has been pointed out is the cinematic equivalent of ulysses . Like James Joyce , varda lets rip a stream of consciousness that is disturbing , sincere and beautifully sublime.The protoganist is a young female drifter, a vagabond who is eternally free. She requires human contact only to fulfill her basic needs and her solitude is complete and absolute , accentuated by her complete disdain for authority or advise.The people she meets are all left with indelible memories of her.Those that pity her are later assailed by thier own infirmities. She refuses to blend or compromise and as one character says is perpetually withering.She dies alone and uncared for and she leaves absolutely no conventional emotional baggage behind.This isnt about a hippie , or a bum , or a dope addict or just a mentally unsound person. Its about a compassionate person who choses to abnegate all her social bonds and moral barriers and lives for nothing more than basic survival. She is the eternal soul that is freedom. Pure , absolute and totally decadent freedom.

Someone moving through life in a way so counter to the norm, taking the road less traveled and often so vulnerable doing so, is like a mirror held up to humanity. Some react with incredible generosity and try to give her a leg up, and others are harsh or prey on her. To its credit, the film doesn't glamorize this character and frankly she's often hard to like, and yet Varda has a way of bringing out empathy, a big part of which is suspending judgment. It didn't all work for me, like the maid with problems of her own addressing the camera, and it's a bleak tale, but the profoundly deep kindness of the director radiates like a beacon. Sandrine Bonnaire gave a fine performance too.

A Rave! Beautifully photographed by Patrick Blossier, every shot, every frame is a delightfully balanced composition of light, color, and framing.

What's more amazing still is how Varda can make such a depressing story so mesmerizing. It is a touching, enchanting story of a lost girl slowly sinking deeper and deeper into society's refuse pile. And even though from the first reel we know her fate, we have to see how it unfolds. I don't remember the last time I saw such a beautiful film. One for the film schools. A masterpiece of French neo-realism.

With an antagonizing protagonist who is as doomed as the plane trees in the film...this film could be seen as strictly nihilistic. I recently watched "SherryBaby" and strongly preferred this film which I watched a week prior, and yet I still find myself pondering Sandrine Bonnaire's portrayal of a woman who is stranded.

Indeed "No one makes it alone" could better be the tag line here, and Bonnaire's Mona goes on an odyssey that is nothing short of harrowing. Also trading heroin chic for (self-imposed?) homeless bleak pushed us into less charted filmic waters. Choosing an unknown for the title role was also a good call I suspect. The film is now older than it's lead actress was at the time.

So much of the film talks about how Mona stinks, perhaps smell-a-vision would have helped ;> Honestly her face is still too attractive, although wide and maybe manly in a way, that for me the sense of her scent didn't wash. That being said, her disaffection was on display so well, that you could see her as having a dirty soul. At nearly every chance of being likable she veers to the other direction, the one notable exception for me being her interaction with the "platonologne" (is that like octogenarian, don't know the French...the characters all had interesting descriptions in the credits)..

Additionally, from the English subtitles and snatches of French, I sense the dialog (should I say dialogue) in this was quite cutting and clever in parts.

While Mona lives without roof or law, while she may move without purpose or direction, she is more than a human tumbleweed. She does not live without leaving a trace...but the filmmaker keeps us intentionally distant from her, we are never allowed inside her mental tent. Thus our composite sketch of her is as complex and contradictory as the people she encounters. Not only does Mona live without control over her life, her death as well eludes her.

Viewers may find it less easy to escape.

Thurston Hunger 7/10

What I admired the most about "Vagabond" is the objective, evenhanded approach of the director towards her "heroine". She neither praises nor condemns her chosen "lifestyle", she simply observes it - and she observes it so well that this feels like the work of someone who's had first-hand experiences with similar people and surroundings. To be perfectly honest, the film doesn't have much psychological (or sociological) depth, and it can get boring at times while you're watching it, but right after it's over, you know that you've seen a good movie. (***)

In winter in the south of France, a young woman is found frozen in a ditch. She's unkempt, a vagabond. Through flashbacks and brief interviews, we trace her final weeks as she camps alone or falls in with various men and women, many of whom project their needs onto her or try to give her life direction.

The film combines straightforward narrative scenes, in which we see Mona living her life, with pseudo-documentary sequences in which people who knew Mona turn to the camera and comment on what they remember about her. Significant events are sometimes left unshown, so that the viewer must piece the information together to gain a full picture.

I enjoyed the concept of this film. Telling a story in flashback is not new, and in some cases may even be cliché. But I like that this film starts with a "vagabond", someone we expect to be a fairly unremarkable human being, and then fleshes them out to be a rather interesting (maybe even fascinating) subject...

This is a very naked film, almost like a documentary, with nothing to improve on the story it tells or to beautify its people and circumstances. It tells the story of a girl who is completely out of society and her way down to the inevitable bitter end. The film begins by the discovery of her body, and it ends by showing how the body got there. She merely stumbled, which she apparently did all her life. Sandrine Bonnaire's rendering of a character without character, lost in life with nothing to live for, almost without identity, is extremely prosaic, there is very little play-acting and no drama at all, just plain humdrum ordinariness, with a few occasional glimpses of hope when some male friends try to help her, which leaves her indifferent, like receiving money just to throw it away. It's a portrait of a female bum and nothing else, very interesting but not in the least inspiring. A film to only see once.

Mona the vagabond lives on the fringes of French society, in a life without meaning, purpose or direction.

I watched this because of all the stellar reviews, but I'm afraid I must have missed something. The character of Mona has little or no personality while drifting through life being rude to people, getting high and contributing nothing to anyone's life. She's not interesting or exciting. She's just useless.

I've seen and known enough people like that: there is no secret meaning to what they're doing. They are just lazy bums. I wouldn't want Mona anywhere near me, as she tends to steal anything that isn't nailed down and leave her friends in the lurch. Sure she's enigmatic - because there isn't anything to her. Lots of junkies, winos and bums I've seen are enigmatic; I wouldn't want to see a film about them either.

Possibly there is something there that I totally missed. Otherwise I'm assuming that all the reviews are from people who assume anything done by a French female director is high art.

Agnès Varda is commonly associated with the Nouvelle Vague and more than François Truffaut, Jean-Luc "God Ard" or Eric Rohmer, she delivered some of the jewels of this French trend with "Cléo De 5 à 7" (1961). It doesn't mean that everything she made turned into gold. One can skip "les Créatures" (1966) without remorse. Twenty years later, she issued her strongest work since "Cléo De 5 à 7" which justifiably dominated from an artistic perspective French cinematographic production: "Sans Toi Ni Loi" that caused a stir.

It works as an alternation of flashes-back and interviews with people about their recollections involving a female rambler named Mona. We won't know much about herself. After she passed her high school diploma, she started to work for different bosses as a secretary but grew tired of his job. So, she packed in to leave for adventure through odd jobs. However, Varda's heroine keeps all her mystery and ambiguity. Are we really sure about what she says? Doesn't she lie? The female filmmaker doesn't comfort the audience because as the elements of the puzzle are pieced together, she throws the people who met Mona out in the same basket, either it is this university professor, this Maroccan guest worker or this former philosophy student who believed in the events of May 1968 in France: they are all responsible for Mona's death because of their egoism, their lack of communication with her. Varda delivers a similar message to her 1961 film: loneliness is a burden and it's better to open oneself to others to make things improve.

"Sans Toi Ni Loi" has the form of a documentary with a gritty tonality in which the female filmmaker keeps a certain distance with her heroine and everything she goes through. Thanks to this, tawdry or violent sequences take another dimension like the moment when the garage owner leaves Mona's tent pulling up his trousers or the man who rapes her in the woods. We won't see the horrid act.

Varda hired non-professional actors and that's why her film has a larger than life feel. An impression accentuated by Sandrine Bonnaire's sensational performance. She "lives" more than she acts her role. The role of this rambler fits her like a glove.

This is one that can stand multiple viewings.

It's winter, off tourist season in the south of France. A frozen young female vagabond is found in a ditch. The police investigates and interviews various people. In flashbacks, Mona Bergeron (Sandrine Bonnaire) is drifting aimlessly on the road encountering various people.

There is a free flowing meandering quality to the movie. The tension is provided by the fact that the audience already knows that she's going to die. It becomes like a countdown as we wonder how she ends up at the side of the road. It's good that Bonnaire isn't the supermodel type although she could be a little rougher. Mona is a hustler and not necessarily a victim. There is an overall sense of dread and sadness that permeates the movie.

This is only my second proper Varda film: I've only watched her documentary on her late husband (director Jacques Demy), JACQUOT DE NANTES (1991) and her ode to nickelodeon days ONE HUNDRED AND ONE NIGHTS OF SIMON CINEMA (1995); I do have 4 more titles by her on VHS but, alas, only in French i.e. with no English subtitles!

Despite being past her vintage, this is a remarkable piece of work: affecting but unsentimental, vivid rather than depressing. It deals with the last few days of a vagrant girl (a member of the working-class who got fed up with her vapid lifestyle and decided to find herself again 'on the road'), played with candor and great passion by Sandrine Bonnaire - a deserving Cesar Award recipient (the film itself emerged triumphant at Cannes). Still, the film doesn't romanticize her existence at all - the rejections and abuses she suffers throughout her journey, the abject poverty, the bitter cold, indeed her entire unwholesome environment - and, in fact, has all the air of being a story gleaned from the headlines (fittingly given a cine-verite' approach by Varda, providing intermittent interrogations by the police of the people who saw her last and one particular character addressing the audience directly at several stages during the film!).

Necessarily episodic in nature, the film does goes on a tad too long (especially the interlude with the Arabic immigrant, who actually plays himself!) but it basically covers the gamut of emotions, while also containing an unexpected - but most welcome - spurt of irreverence in the scenes involving a senile rich old lady, the messy (and vaguely Surrealist) Wine Festival towards the very end, and extending even to the droll final credit roll! Like a number of their early releases, the Criterion DVD is unfortunately bare-bones.

I enjoyed watching it. Although simple, it brings some reflections that make the narrative interesting and captivating. The degradation of the main character in the course of the film because of the different situations in the context of the story attracts the attention of the viewer. Despite being a tragic drama, it is worth a lot as entertainment and therefore I recommend it.

I can't believe that I saw this film ten years ago in Dr. Flitterman-Lewis' class on Women and Film at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was probably one of the most memorable films from that class. I thought Sandrine Bonnaire did an absolute brilliant job as playing Mona. I felt so sorry for her. She was never really home anywhere and nothing ever worked out for her. Maybe she just didn't fit in anywhere and longed for something better but she was getting worse. She lived anywhere in the fields, etc. She needed the kindness of strangers who never forgot her as they told her friends. She needed a bath to be washed away from the dirt of her existence. She never belonged anywhere. We didn't know her parents or where she came from. She just came and left without answering questions.

I just finished seeing sans tot Ni Li ten minutes ago and I can truthfully say that I am reverberating from the shock of having confronted a true classic. By "Classic" we are talking here the ilk of Blue Angel and Casablanca. This film portrays the existential tale of human loneliness embodied by the forlorn hapless Mona, incapable of love and unwilling to thank people for their efforts to help her....And those who help her- how skillfully they are handled by the movie maker.

Whether to hold their nose, love her or kick her, they know not.Last week I saw "North Country", loved it and gave it 3 stars, but this epic of the strange wandering girl deserves 5. It is the best movie I have seen this year. The five stars apply also to the music, photography and characterizations.

The movie is taken in totally a weird style. All the actors other than Sandrine look very amateur and this is what makes the movie interesting. It is as if Agnès Varda wandered in the streets with Sandrine and get some people to play in her movie with full improvisation. This is another feature of French New Wave. It would be unbearable to watch if Sandrine was not so good at playing a weirdo, that is, a beautiful, stubborn and free-spirited crackhead.

I've seen several films by Agnès Varda and this one is pretty much what I expected...unfortunately. While Varda is loved by some, her films have a very non-cinematic quality. That makes her work very much the stuff artsy folk often like but which have no broad appeal. To many of her fans, she is a genius with her documentary and documentary style films. As for me, her work just doesn't do much for me. This isn't necessarily a criticism...just the truth that these style films just don't excite me in any way...possibly because he subject matter is often so mundane.

When "Vagabond" begins, a young lady is found dead in a trench...dead, apparently, from exposure. The film then backtracks a few days and shows this woman's life up to her untimely death. Mona is what folks used to call a hobo...a person without a home who likes the life of the open road. She'll work when she has to...but only enough to get her a bit to eat, some alcohol, some cigarettes or some drugs. But for the most part she enjoys a subsistence life- -one with no real connections. The film shows her many interactions with others and some of the folks she met are interviewed. It's all fiction but done in a way that appears to be a documentary. Is there any real point to all this? I dunno...but I assume Varda's point is that there is no point...a sad look into a sad life. I was assuming I'd develop a connection...a sense of caring about this dead woman...but this was not to be. Instead, it's an oddly detached film.

If this sounds like a depressing film, then you pretty much get the drift of the movie. It's unpleasant and mildly interesting. If you look at the reviews, most folks seem to love her work but I also suspect these are Varda-philes. As for me, I adore French films but not this type. I would have much preferred a more fake, glossy and cinematic project...perhaps one like Varda's deceased husband, Jacques Demy, would have made.