THE GLEANERS AND I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse)
Septuagenarian filmmaker Agnes Varda ("Vagabond"), frequently called the grandmother of the French New Wave, caught a bit on television about the amount of money lost by a wheat farmer if his combine wasn't adjusted properly. This made Varda, an art lover, recall the famous Millet painting 'Les Glaneuses' and the idea of taking to the road to investigate this rural activity and its modern counterparts gave birth to her award winning documentary, "The Gleaners and I."
Varda's film is an unusual combination of a diary reflecting on her own aging, a road trip, and the documentation of the economic, societal, cultural and artistic reasons that people have for gathering the refuse of others. While sometimes Varda's digressions indulgently stray too far from her main theme, for the most part she's found a rhythm that can tie rural, post-harvest gleaning to a court case involving homeless youngesters who vandalized a market. When she veers from a family who've discovered an abandoned vineyard to spend a minute on her own camcorder's dangling lens cap, frustration felt by the viewer is quickly assuaged by her good natured spirit.
Of course, Varda makes a point that filmmakers themselves are gleaners, and that dancing lens cap footage may just be proof that one man's wasted videotape is another's art. Varda uses famous paintings of gleaners to segue to stories of artists who recycle trash to create new works. Then, in another aside, Varda ventures into a second store because she's charmed by the sign (''curios' is common, but 'finds' is more inviting,' she says) and fatefully discovers an oil painting of gleaners in the field!
Varda has conversations with the many types of gleaners she comes across. There's a chef who charges $100 a plate for meals he prepares from his gleanings and a financially secure man who only eats from the trash in protest of the waste he sees all around him. A funny sequence gets as many interpretations of the law that governs the gleaning around oyster beds as people providing them. Varda admires a 'Trash is Beautiful' educational program that teaches kids about recycling, then notes that they're only exposed to pretty pieces of plastic and have probably never shook the hand of a garbageman.
At 82 minutes, "The Gleaners and I" covers a lot of territory. Not only does it provoke thoughts about waste in general, it engages us with an impish senior still breaking new ground in the art of filmmaking. As Varda cuts from a shot of her own wrinkled hand to a Rembrandt, she reflects 'It's always the same, a self portrait.'
B+
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