THE GLEANERS AND I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse)
Directed by Agnes Varda
Plan B NR 82 min. subtitles
In New York City, people put out their unwanted furniture one night a week, and in my garret days my apartment and those of many of my friends were furnished with items rescued from curbside a step ahead of the trash collectors. I still have a piece or two of these foraged treasures. Like most of us, I am a sort of gleaner.
Traditionally, gleaners are people who gather what's been left in the fields after the crop has been harvested. By extension they're scavengers, people who live off the fat of the land and society's careless excess. By further extension they're artists who turn waste into beauty. And by one more extension, they're Agnes Varda, the extraordinary French filmmaker known as the Grandmother of the New Wave, who has been creating films for nearly half a century (Cleo From 5 to 7; One Sings, the Other Doesn't).
In her wonderful new documentary about people who, out of necessity, principle, obsession, or just for the fun of it, gather up the discards of a disposable society, Varda herself is a gleaner of stories and people on the fringes of everyday life. Armed with her digital camera, her photographer's eye, her irrepressible wit, her curiosity, and her social conscience, she gathers the gatherers into a film that is informative and funny and wise.
Les Glaneurs, a famous 1867 painting by French Barbizon painter Jean-FranE7ois Millet, shows three peasant women in a wheat field = gathering up what had been left behind after the harvest. Varda visits this painting at the MusE9e d'Orsay, and then takes us out on a = gleaning expedition of her own. We go to potato fields and apple orchards, market stalls and restaurant dumpsters. We meet patrons of a rural bar who explain the difference between "gleaning" and "picking", and a black-robed lawyer who quotes statute and verse on ancient gleaning rights established back in 1554 by the young King Henry IV. We visit with a salvage artist whose medium is what people cast aside: "Where others see a cluster of junk, I see a cluster of opportunity."
There is not quite enough material here even for this film's modest 82 minute length, and so it tends to double back on itself from time to time. But the people are amiable, and Varda is in no hurry. From time to time she shows us shots of her own graying hair and liver-spotted, wrinkled skin as she muses about the always surprising phenomenon of aging. From a junk pile, she salvages a clock with no hands. Varda, in her 70s, is not one to countenance waste, and she makes it clear she is committed to gleaning abundant riches out of what remains of her time here.
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