Popular reviews

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 1

  Varda intentionally sets this amongst abundance. She takes a character she knows is going to be seen as unsympathetic by so many eyes, and she frames her from everyone else's point of view, letting other voices slowly build a picture for us that may or may not be accurate. What we get from the titular character is just another perspective, and by her own admission, she does not always tell people the whole truth. The insights derived from this are the humanizing of those scorned and unsettled and an understanding of the disaffection that the rote, monolithic normal world can instill.

  December count: 53/100

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  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus: blast injury] ★★★★★ 17

  Six Unholy Stars Blazing In The Black Firmament

  NO JOBS
  NO BOSSES

  aka

  WANDERERS OF LATE CAPITALIST WASTE

  Vagabond is Agnes Varda's hyrmn to absolute female autonomy at all costs, a post-apocalyptic road movie without a car, a biker movie without a gang or a bike. A Nuclear Winter in advance of The Bomb or The Leak or The Meltdown. Vagabond looks like what Amebix's Arise sounds like, what Celtic Frost's To Mega Therion sounds like, what Sacrilege's Behind The Realms Of Madness sounds like (especially that last one). The end has come and gone many times, or is immanent & with us always. Everyone wants to give Mona a job, a reason to exist. Mona already exists but that isn't…

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  Review by kailey ★★★★½ 14

  winter break watch-list

  female drifters are all alike- loafers and man-chasers.

  a woman struggles up the path, huddled in her filthy blanket. she needs water, bread, any sort of sustenance. people seem to run from her gaze. she continues until suddenly, a blast of color erupts. there are men everywhere, dressed in costumes, throwing grapes. they laugh. they paw. they smear the fruit on her skin as she screams and screams and no one listens.

  in vagabond, our main character seems to know instinctively that this is a harsh world. she wanders under a grey color palette, dirt clogging her nails. she snaps at people who try to help her and angrily rebuffs kindness. she's spiky, defensive, furious. how could…

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  Review by 🌻 lindsay 🌻 ★★★★½ 9

  you wander and you’re free

  you are isolated but you’re free

  you are vulnerable but you’re free 

  you are hungry but you’re free

  you are free and you are living

  you are alive, right?

  no you don’t want help. 

  you can do this

  you can do this. 

  you are hurt. you are tired. you are cold. 

  lay down here for now and rest.

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  Review by Kurdt ★★★★ 1

  Questions how many people we’ve unknowingly affected in our lives, even briefly, just leaving behind a lingering memory or a half-remembered moment. Mona’s life of freedom allows Varda’s fourth-wall breaking, documentary-style moments of self-reflexivity to hold more weight; characters say she was a friend, but how much of that friendship came from genuine affection and how much derived from subconscious superiority and feeling self-congratulatory over helping a homeless person? One claims Mona had “no wishes, no wants” as a criticism, but does Mona’s presence and her life outside of societal norms make people more aware of their dreams failing, actually clamouring to live a life like hers with no pressure to be or do anything? Varda continually walks this line,…

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  Review by 𝔡𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔶 ★★★★★ 3

  being a woman has forced me again and again towards two warring impulses -- one is to walk away, to reject everything external, to reclaim myself from others, to physically remove myself from the world of men and masculinity, to make myself ugly, mean, and separate. but that fantasy, shared i know by countless other women, is always stopped by the second impulse -- fear. it's the same fear that has you calling a car when you'd really rather walk home, or smiling when someone tells you to in a loud enough voice. the second impulse wins, again and again and again, making the fantasy of escape, even if brief and fragile, all the more wonderful.

  Mona lives on the…

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★ 2

  Vagabond shows us what we all know implicitly but we do not want to admit. What makes us keep our jobs and work menial jobs even if they break our spirit and never provide quite enough. What has us worried over food and rent and debt and our health. What makes us vote for people we may not believe in, the lesser of two evils. And what has us saying "it's better than nothing" despite dreaming of a better something.

  We can try to exist outside of our systems, but the way those work makes it unfeasible. There are these people out there and many of them find a way, but it's an existence fraught with instability even if it's not impossible: vagabonds continually drift in-and-out, in both places and in our memories.

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  Review by Scumbalina ★★★★★ 2

  ◖◗ ◕ ◓ ◒ ◑ ◐ ☹ 𝕰𝖓𝖉 𝖔𝖋 𝕯𝖆y𝖘 𝕾𝖈𝖆𝖛𝖊𝖓𝖌𝖊𝖗 𝕳𝖚𝖓𝖙 ☹ ◐ ◑ ◒ ◓ ◕ ◖◗
  #𝟭 𝗔𝗻 𝗔𝗴𝗻𝗲𝘀 𝗩𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗮 𝗳𝗶𝗹𝗺

  This girl is a rumor. I feel like I've known this girl, but who knows if I really have. Breaking all the walls, beyond the walls, there are no walls. Ideas, memories, grudges, odors, someone whose freedom made me uncomfortable. I've been parts of this girl, not whole parts but essential parts. The only weird thing about her gender is that we might think it was weird for a girl to be like this. Everyone is like this, sort of.

  At her best she's like a cat, affectionate and soft. At her worst she's still like…

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  Review by Arthur Tuoto ★★★★★ 3

  Varda inicia seu filme assumindo seus procedimentos. O corpo congelado recusa uma iminência narrativa, já sabemos que sua personagem está morta. A diretora não sabe de onde ela veio, abraça sua potência subjetiva: começa pelo mar. O que constitui Mona é sua inadequação, seu trajeto desajustado, aquilo que ela deixa aonde passa, os recortes vagos que formam o filme. A montagem é esse encaixe de peças que tenta intuir uma figura, Varda se equilibra entre a ambiguidade daqueles testemunhos e a objetividade de um personagem ficcional. O documental entra aqui não no sentido de um realismo determinista, mas tensionando a realidade cinematográfica do quadro, desestabilizando uma forma que a todo momento quer se reinventar.

  "Você não é uma marginal. Você…

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  Review by Cormac 👑 ★★★★★ 24

  The more I think about it, the more I realize I live life in a perpetual crossroads. This constant middle lane between loneliness and freedom. An intersection between existence and merely coasting by. The well-doomed purgatory between failing to actively pursue a life worth living. And wanting to make much more of myself, to phrase it as bluntly as I possibly can.

  The biggest fear is one day losing all control of that choice completely.

  Mona, when we first meet her, no longer has the luxury of such choices. We find her dead in a ditch, her corpse still warm, her legacy slowly fading into the air of yesterday’s news along with a lifetime’s worth of muck and scars. They’ll…

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  Review by Gerry Nava ★★★★★

  Everybody seems to have plans for Mona. Work on this, do that, live over there, never genuinely caring. They offer her pity instead of empathy, sometimes even jealous of her freedom.

  I’ve been thinking about the farmer and his final thoughts on Mona

  “By proving she’s useless, she’s helping the system she’s rejecting.”

  Except, from my point of view, settling down and turning passive is probably an even worse way to fight, ever the centrist, he’s looking to assimilate rather than make some sort of change, even on his life.
  We’re told early on we need to have goals, something to work endlessly for, just so you can say “you’ve made it”, even if you have to step over others to do it.

  Mona just said, fuck that shit, I don’t need a reason to exist, I just am.

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★★ 25

  "People bugged me for a long time, but that's over with now."

  Having shamefully seen only one feature from Nouvelle Vague-progenitor Agnès Varda (the outstanding Cleo from 5 to 7), I'm glad that the birthday of our friend Cinephile provided a merry pretense for further exploration—though as I soon discovered, Varda's searing portrayal of a vulnerable drifter's demise is far from festive.

  Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) commences with the discovery of its young protagonist's frozen body lying unceremoniously in a barren ditch in southern France, followed by terse documentary-style interviews with those who had seen her last. Though the unclaimed corpse is bound for an anonymous potter's field, it is revealed (via omniscient narration from Varda) that she was named…