On Agnès Varda’s Vagabond

Still from Vagabond, by Agnès Varda.

As a teenager, my view of the world was bleak. I was the only one of my small group of misfit friends to leave home and go away to college. Not long before I did, I saw Agnès Varda’s film Vagabond. I can’t remember if I saw it at the local art-house cinema (which went out of business the same year) or if I pulled it off the rack at the neighborhood video-rental store or if I happened upon it on Cinemax, which in the late eighties was known for showing the HBO leftovers: foreign films and soft porn. I’m fairly certain I saw Vagabond alone.

There were few female heroines that made sense to me growing up in the eighties, an era whose filmic representations were