Vagabond

A farm worker finds the body of a young woman lying frozen in a ditch one winter morning in the south of France. She wears a worn leather jacket and dirty jeans, and the police take her for a homeless drifter who died of cold and exposure, with no one able to identify her. The film then moves backwards through the final weeks of her life, tracing how Mona Bergeron drifted from place to place, sleeping in a tent near a garage or a cemetery, taking casual work, and relying on the hospitality of strangers. Her fierce refusal of any settled life shapes every encounter, and the people she met along the way — a young woman, a farmer and his family, a Tunisian seasonal labourer — each recall only a fragment of someone none of them really knew.

Agnès Varda directed and wrote the film, the eighth of the fourteen features she made in chronological order, arriving between Documenteur and Jane B. by Agnès V. Sandrine Bonnaire plays Mona, heading a credited cast of forty-two that includes Macha Méril, Yolande Moreau and Stéphane Freiss. Varda reconstructs Mona's story from the recollections of those who crossed her path, and the portrait that emerges is of a young woman whose insistence on freedom carried her to the margins of society.

The film, a French and British co-production, took about 8 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.6 from roughly 16,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 7.4 from 372, and a critics' rating of 9.1 from 26 reviews places it well above those audience scores.