On how Agnès Varda's Vagabond (1985) handles the unknowability of its protagonist.

Vagabond opens with the discovery of a woman's frozen body in a ditch. The film then proceeds backward and sideways through the last weeks of her life, collecting testimonies from the people who encountered her.

What makes Vagabond formally radical is that it never resolves Mona's interiority. The testimonies contradict each other. Each witness projects something different onto her: freedom, failure, threat, inspiration. The film accumulates a portrait of Mona from outside while refusing to give us access to what she actually thought or felt.

This formal refusal is the film's argument about who gets to be known. Mona is a woman outside all social systems — homeless, without family, without employment. The film is asking whether such a person can be known by those whose lives she passes through, and answering: only in the ways that the observer's own investments allow.

Sandrine Bonnaire's performance achieves something extraordinary within these formal constraints: Mona is present on screen for the entirety of the film and remains opaque. You feel her without understanding her, which is the only accurate way to feel a stranger.