Wild Strawberries & Vagabond as Road Movies

Ingmar Bergman's 1957 Swedish film Wild Strawberries, and Agnes Varda's 1984 French film Vagabond are both road films centering on the lead character's journey. In Bergman's film, the one-day journey of 76-year old distinguished medical scientist Isak Borg Victor Sjorstrom in a brilliant performance) is inward, a meditation on his life. In Varda's film, the journey of the teenaged Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) is that of an alienated dropout from society who is simply drifting through Southern France in the winter, and more significantly, just drifting through life. Isak attempts to be thoughtful, while Mona opts for thoughtlessness.

Varda does not explain much about Mona's motivations except to say that she was a discontented secretary who hated her boss, and left her structured life for that of a vagabond. Film critic Roger Ebert argues that Mona is blank, devoid of ambition. "She has gone on the road, not to make her fortune, but to drop out completely from all striving."

A work of fiction, Varda framed the movie in a documentary style with herself as narrator. The movie opens with the camera slowly moving through frozen vineyards and then moving in to a shot of the body of a dead young woman lying in a ditch. The storyline is then unfolded through flashbacks dealing with the final weeks of Mona's life.

The original English title of the film was Without A Roof and Beyond the Law, a title that more aptly explains Mona's choice, while Vagabond, the later title, has a ro

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to late. Mona's wandering is not shown as totally dark. There is a section when she comes out of her tent on a sunny morning, and smiles feeling the warmth of the sun. She also appears to be having a good time when she spends a couple of days in a chateau with an old countess, but this may just be due to the many glasses of brandy she shares with the countess. The audience does not know because Mona's interior life is a blank. Ultimately, darkness takes over completely and the audience sees Mona as an outcast of society, not a free spirit vagabond. She is more a lonely lost soul than a dropout in search of freedom. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, and Mona's story seems an example of the truth of that statement. Ingmar Bergman's Professor Borg, however, is Mona's opposite. Wild Strawberries is entirely a movie about Borg's reflections on his life, and his attempt to understand himself, and why his successful life contains so many disappointments. Film historian David Cook calls the film beautiful and lyrical, "constructed around the dreams and memories as they assail the elderly" (648). The 400-mile car trip he is taking from Stockholm to the University of Lund to receive an honorary doctorate affords h

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