#74 is another great Agnes Varda film - These are the first two films of her's that I've seen and I know I have a few more down the line, but these first two are really stellar - I bought a copy of the first Cleo disk on sale last week - (not part of box set, so no special features) but maybe at some point I will get that.
In one sense the two films are similiar - they follow the path of a woman as she wanders thru the world, but whereas Cleo was a 2 hr snippet in Paris, Vagabond is a few weeks of a woman wandering the French Countryside
The very first scene sets you up for the downer - her body is found in a ditch - the rest of the movie then proceeds to trace her steps of the last few months as she came into contact with people. The film cuts from her to the people talking like in a documentary to the camera about their impressions of her. What is striking is the mystery of this woman - she is and remains an enigma throughout the film. One scene that strikes me is after a particularly bad incident, she is sitting looking at seven postcards- they are random sort of pictures and you wonder their significance - in another she pulls a small painting out of her pack that has gotten ripped - perhaps it was stolen but a strange thing to carry on the road. These things are never explained. They show a brief bit of her as she explains she had been a secretary in Paris, but at this point she has totally turned her back on the system.
There is one character in the film that suggests her fate - he says all the wanderers he knew either quit or died cause the loneliness got to them and they fell into drugs and alcohol. I think that's what happens here - you see her slowly get worse and have a tougher time of things, and watching her, you feel incredible sympathy and the whole time you're stuck knowing her fate as her life plays out
I will probably have to buy this box set - wonder if it'll ever make Blu-Ray - great great film
RB
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