Vagabond 1985

On a cold winter morning in the vineyards of a small village in the Gard region of France, the contorted body of Mona Bergeron, Sandrine Bonnaire is discovered in a ditch. The local gendarmes quickly determine she is a vagrant who froze to death, and she is buried in a potter’s field.

Mona’s last winter is portrayed through flashbacks initiated by interviews with people who had crossed her path. She wanders the country alone, hitchhiking, sleeping in a tent, and taking odd jobs just to survive. She endures hunger, thirst, biting cold, and dangerous situations, while often lacking cigarettes or cannabis. Along the way, she crosses paths with a maid who envies her freedom, shares brief relationships with another vagabond, meets a family of goat farmers, encounters a professor who studies plane trees, engages with a Tunisian vineyard worker, and comes across a group of homeless youths who drink, use drugs, and fritter away time at a railway station. In one moment of honesty, she tells a companion that she left her life as a secretary in Paris to seek freedom and a life without responsibility.

Her journey wears on her physical limits: her boots fall apart, and after she loses her tent and sleeping bag in a fire at a squat in Nîmes, she is left with only a blanket for warmth. She stumbles upon a bizarre harvest festival, where she is daubed with wine dregs by men in strange costumes. After escaping, she wanders into a vineyard, where she falls into a ditch. Tired, cold, wet, and now injured, she cannot rise, and she succumbs to the elements.