Sandrine Bonnaire

In Agnès Varda's Vagabond (1985), Sandrine Bonnaire makes Mona Bergeron difficult company and gives us no reason to expect an improvement. Her physical presence holds our attention, but she supplies none of the reassuring signals that tell us a character is good underneath. We cannot settle into waiting for her to become agreeable. This is the Bonnaire we value most: she makes watching someone closely worthwhile even when liking them is hard.

Maurice Pialat gave her the breakthrough role of Suzanne in À Nos Amours (1983), and their work together continued beyond it. By Joan the Maid (1994), Jacques Rivette was asking her to carry a historical lead as Joan of Arc. Then Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie (1995) gave her Sophie Bonhomme, a more repressed woman whose complexity required something beyond open defiance. The repressed women matter as much as the defiant ones when considering what she can do.

The early performances have sometimes been credited to youthful naturalism, with more deliberate craft said to emerge later. We are not convinced that this distinction helps much with Vagabond. Bonnaire's refusal to supply a hidden sweetness is a sustained choice, and an actor trying to win our approval would have made a different film. Varda gives her room to remain awkward while the witnesses try to explain Mona to us.

We felt ashamed of wanting Mona to be nicer, because Bonnaire made us recognise how much our sympathy depended on being offered pleasant company. That discomfort is a large part of why Vagabond moves us so deeply. The succession of witnesses sometimes feels too neatly arranged, as though each response had been allotted its place in advance. Bonnaire keeps Mona from becoming merely an example for them to discuss. Start there, prepared to care about someone who does little to encourage it.