The Gleaners and I

Grand Illusion Cinema, May 11-24

call to confirm showtimes (206) 523-3935

To glean, we learn in Agnès Varda's new documentary/essay film The Gleaners and I, is to gather after the harvest—to comb the fields for what's been left behind. It's a practice with roots in prehistory. Have you ever come upon a blackberry patch that seems to have been picked clean, but then noticed a few ripe berries down low? Then you, too, are a gleaner.

Gleaners were once a common sight in the European countryside, where for the poorest peasants, this was a means of survival. Long before Varda, artists were drawn to them, so she begins with a look at some famous 19th century paintings. She then moves on to people who, in diverse ways, continue the practice in contemporary France. This is rich soil for gleaning, in part because of laws that would seem to explicitly allow it. France, it seems, has not yet enshrined private property as something holy. After all, this is the country of McDonald’s-smasher Jose Bove.

A group of French critics named Gleaners their country's best film of 2000. This is quite an achievement for a film that—on one level—functions wonderfully as travelogue. Ranging all over the country, Varda takes time out from her main subject to introduce us to a wine grower who expostulates on his "anti-ego philosophy," and a couple recalling their meeting at a village dance. These people would be at home in an Eric Rohmer film. The overall impression is positive—a society not relentlessly hostile to eccentrics and others who choose not to service the corporate machinery.

The people we meet include artists who scavenge for their materials. Yet it's the gleaners of food—even if their circumstances don't require it—who are most compelling. As in Dark Days, we see the humor with which people cope with homelessness. One man imparts with a laugh that "right now we have one, two, three, four fridges and two freezers that we picked up and fixed." An articulately pugnacious man in rubber boots says "we are so stupid with food.... It's easy to tell from the smell if it's OK or not.... Salvaging is a matter of ethics for me because I find it utterly unacceptable to see all this waste on the streets.... I've eaten 100 percent trash for ten years now. I've never been ill."

Why is it that French and Belgian filmmakers seem so much more open to turning their cameras on this world of down-and-outers: the world of Carax's Lovers on the Bridge, of the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta, of Varda's own Vagabond? Here in the U.S., something like George Washington is quite a rare thing. But in contrast to some of these works, Gleaners is uplifting, because even the poorest people here are survivors.

Varda, at 72, is a survivor too. With some 45 years of filmmaking behind her, she takes to her light-weight digital camera with youthful enthusiasm. At one point, she films her own hand seeming to attack trucks on the road. It's the kind of juvenile trick in which beginning filmmakers indulge, but Varda's enchantment with the equipment is infectious. Ironically, she also uses the camera to explore her own mortality. Showing us Rembrandt post cards, she extends a spotted, gnarled hand into the frame, saying "this is my project: to film with one hand my other hand. To enter into the horror of it. I find it extraordinary. I feel as if I'm an animal—worse, I am an animal I don't know. And here's Rembrandt's self portrait. But it's just the same in fact, always a self-portrait."