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THE GLEANERS AND I Send This Review to a Friend
Agnes Varda, the New Wave director still at the top of her craft, has made a stunningly creative documentary in which she explores people who live by scavenging in various ways. It was a special hit at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 2000. What makes the film so outstanding is the context in which she places the various individuals whose lives she hones in on, and her witty asides that she contributes by including herself and her comments in the film.
Thus she seizes a subject and takes it far beyond what a less creative director might have seen as the potential. As well as being informative about various aspects of our society, Varda's film is pleasingly entertaining. What inspired Varda was an 1867 painting by Jean-Francois Millet of three women in a wheat field picking up the remains of a harvest. This sent her to explore contemporary gleaning in the country, offset by what she has found in an urban environment.
Varda interweaves information on the legal right to glean in France. She introduces us to assorted characters, including a man who makes a principle of gleaning as a way of life. In passing she shows us the waste of society, and how some people can retrieve what would be lost. There are those who need to live by gleaning. Varda also is amusing, as when she finds items that appeal to her own sense of collecting.
The director spins her film like a story rather than something that is classified as a documentary. It is absolutely out of the ordinary, and the latest work confirms why Varda has been an important force in cinema dating back to those glorious, inventive New Wave years in Paris in the late 1950s and 1960s. Time has not passed her by. A Zeitgeist Films release.
NOTE: "The Gleaners and I" is a forerunner of a 28-film retrospective titled "The World of Agnes Varda" (March 16-April 5) at the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, new York City.
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