10 Outstanding French Films You've Probably Never Heard Of
8. Vagabond (1985) - Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda has spent most of her career making lively short and feature-length documentaries on people's lives. Among her feature-length works of fiction, two stand out: One is 1962's Cleo From 5 To 7 and her 1985 masterpiece Vagabond. The film opens with the discovery of a young homeless woman's corpse found frozen to death in a vineyard. From this starting point, Varda examines each individual of the surrounding region with whom she had interacted before her death. The titular vagabond, Mona Bergeron, arrived in the area almost out of nowhere. She was independent, spirited and appeared to come from a comfortable background, but we shall otherwise know very little about her. Every individual she has encountered, from a rich old woman to a humble Tunisian worker, has a different experience with her. Yet, for all the info gathered from these sources, the picture of who Mona really was remains blurry. This portrait, carried by a pitch-perfect performance from the exceptionally gifted Sandrine Bonnaire, is made fascinating by its incompletion. This is the sort of film that might play in your head if you ever read a newspaper story about a mysterious death and wondered what that person's story was.
I have been a film student for over 4 years, and an insatiable cinephile for even longer. I try to keep my mind as open as possible, so my tastes can range from mainstream masters such as Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg to independent artists such as Abbas Kiarostami and John Cassavetes. I am also a big fan of video games with customizable characters and/or dialogue choices and the ability to influence the plot by the character's decisions. As such, my favourite video games are "Saints Row 2", "Dragon Age: Origins", "Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic", "Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic II: The Sith Lords" and the "Mass Effect" trilogy. Aside from that, I also enjoy "Max Payne 2: The Fall Of Max Payne" and have fond memories of "Rayman 2: The Great Escape" and the original "Tomb Raider" games.
