Next up on the popular-movies-I-haven’t-seen list (okay, not literally next, I decided to skip around a bit) is this Agnès Varda film from 1986. (You will recall Varda from such films as Cléo from 5 to 7 and Faces Places, and I mean also just for being a legendary figure of the French New Wave.)

As the movie begins, we see a young woman’s dead body discovered in a ditch in a field. A voiceover tells us that some unspecified “they” have retraced her steps and talked to the people she met along the path that led her here. What follows is formally neither fish nor fowl — it’s doing some documentary type elements, with people talking to the camera about the girl, but it’s not really committing to that. Sometimes characters just stop in the middle of a scene and talk to the camera in a fourth-wall-breaking way; and the movie makes not even a smidgen of an attempt to pretend that it’s only showing the things that someone else could have seen. So it’s neither straight narrative nor straight documentary, but a weird hybrid form that shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does.

And so the thing about the last few weeks (months?) of this girl’s life is that it’s mostly not brutally sad. She’s on the road largely because she wants to be — she graduated from a trade school, but didn’t feel like working, and wanted to go on the road. Because she’s a young, attractive white girl, she gets a lot of people willing to help her out, and the early part of the movie involves her leaving places she could have stayed, spurning helpful offers, and generally just sabotaging her life out of a kind of aimlessness — but also having some fun and meeting people she likes along the way.

And then, almost imperceptibly, the places she’s staying and the company she keeps get worse (though even in desperate poverty, French people still have baguettes, wine, and cigarettes, apparently); her own behavior goes downhill; and it’s with a shocking rapidity that we see her fall from a kind of genteel marginality to the desperate straits whose end we already know.

What really makes the movie, though, is her interactions with all these other people, and their addresses to the camera. Because by and large she’s only interacted with people briefly and in a limited way, and yet she makes this oversized impact on them all, as they project their own desires and worldviews onto her and create out of her this largely mythical girl who doesn’t really exist. To one woman, who watched her shacking up with a random guy who had a lot of weed, she’s living a life of enviable love and affection; others see in her a figure of pity or scorn, a cautionary tale; still others see a kind of wild freedom that fascinates them.

If the movie were just the girl’s story told straight, it’d be very good. Her character is drawn vividly, the episodes she goes through are interesting, and the visual composition of the movie is stunning. This is one of those movies where you could just fast-forward to a random point, pause, and have a good chance that whatever frame is on-screen is something visually interesting enough that you could frame it and put it on your wall. But adding in all the other characters, with their own lives and concerns, but especially with their multiplicity of perspectives on the girl, is what makes it great.

Highly recommended.