vagabondage

Writer and transient Henri Tascheraud describes those like him as “for the most part throwbacks, pure and simple. We don’t fit, and that is why we love vagabondage, and disdain respectability.”

In 17th- and 18th-century England, this panic resulted in harsh laws against vagabondage, and the development of charities to ameliorate the worst effects of enforced destitution.

Marriage is as rare as diamonds nowadays, while sexual vagabondage is well tolerated and well spread.

Varda’s film, though, turns any such eulogy to vagabondage on its head.

She is consigned to a madhouse, and her child to a life of pachyderm vagabondage in the company of a helpful mouse and some jive-talking crows.