The life and death of a troubled young woman in Varda's Vagabond

 Agnes Varda's 1985 film, Vagabond, is one of her best and about as close as she ever came in her rich career to a conventional narrative film: She establishes the story line in the first sequence as some field workers find in a ditch the body of a young woman; the police are called in to investigate a possible homicide, and the rest of the film is a re-creation of the woman - Mona's (in a terrific performance by Sandine Bonnaire) - recent life as a homeless vagabond. AV doesn't stick to the structure that she creates - we learn much more about Mon's life that we could possibly have learned from the people whose path she crossed and who are "interrogated" not so much by the police but by Varda's camera. In the end, Mona's life is still a blank - we know almost nothing about her family or early life; over the few months that the film covers she seems to be about 20 and living alone most of the time, hitching w. no obvious purpose or destination, picking up odd jobs and getting involved in a few minor scams, having and ditching a few relationships, undergoing abuse and rape and terrible conditions, begging and scrounging. She's like a thousand faces each of us has seen in various train stations and city squares and parks, a person most of us would pass by w/out a thought - yet she's no hero, never truly sympathetic, ungracious to those who do try to help her, a difficult and even dangerous person; one sequence, for example, shows her taken in by a sympathetic family trying to "live off the land" through farming and who offers her a place to stay and a start in the outdoor life that she seems to want - and to whom she becomes incredibly gruff and ungrateful. It's a sad film and a puzzling one, particularly in Varda's reluctance to fill in the blanks re Mona's personality and background. We see who she is, but how did she become that person? Childhood abuse? A struggle w/ mental illness? Some other malady? We don't really know, nor do we know how we would have behaved had Mona crossed our path.