They lived in abandoned caravan boxes on the fringes of the French wilderness, and they were filmed without introducing themselves, and I don't know what their names were. On weekdays, they go to the fields to pick up substandard potatoes discarded by factories to make a living, picking as many as possible, because there is always an endless supply of potatoes. Pieces of potatoes are piled on top of the mud, and the mud is covered with plump potatoes. This mud is their source of food and an allusion of their lives. I don't know if it's winter or something else, but the potato field looks very desolate, and that kind of tone is rarely seen in the city, like an air-dried palette with only gray and earth on it. yellow.
Varda focused on interviewing a man. After the scavengers had picked up the potatoes they needed and left, the man appeared among the potatoes, the wind blowing his thinning hair. Said he used to be a truck driver and was later found to have his driver's license permanently revoked for DUI. His wife then left him with their three children, five hundred miles away. "I haven't seen them for two years, and I miss them every day." Presumably because driving was his only survival skill, he never had a job after that. The camera is on his tousled hair and pale cheeks, and his hopeless anticipation can be seen at a glance. Thankfully, he said he was finally free.
However, do they really have no expectations for their own lives? not necessarily. Because they are scavengers, I always look at them with tinted glasses as I grew up in the city. Ever since I was a child, I watched people without jobs and money go through the city begging or scavenging waste, their clothes were always dirty, and their hands always had dirt embedded in their fingernails. They are always waiting at the door after the restaurant closes, or looking for expired food in the supermarket dumpster. They live off what we don't want. In my life, I was educated at school during the day. At night, my parents would cook food with fresh ingredients bought in the market. The food in the refrigerator would be thrown into the trash after the expiration date. Disgusted. Contrasting their lives with these everyday actions, a natural sense of moral superiority among the urban middle class takes root. When I grow up, I gradually understand that people living in the world are inherently absurd and nihilistic, and class differentiation is even more so. In Varda's documentary, they are bending over to pick up potatoes seems to embody a truth: as long as we are all still fighting for survival, our existence is a meaning, even if this meaning is minimal. They seem to be struggling but seem to be doing nothing. They are on the edge of the wilderness, but also on the edge of meaning.
The man with the tousled hair said, "It's better to pick up potatoes here than to rob the store. We're trying our best to survive, and that's what I've been doing. New year's coming, which is great." The scavenger's survival perception, his life is unsatisfactory and empty, and there seems to be a warm atmosphere in his words. After picking up the potatoes, he returned to his place, one of the vans in the wilderness, and showed Varda their only source of water, a faucet. The faucet freezes in the winter, and by that time they've figured out how to keep the water flowing. This is an interesting little episode. Despite the harsh living conditions, they will always try their best to solve the problem and survive. It can be seen that the human will to survive is strong.
In this khaki and desolate place, the scavengers seem to be living a life of ease. There is no saturated color in their life, the kind of high art color that makes people happy. But that doesn't mean their lives are black and white. Society may have forgotten them, and urbanites don't have time to care about their lives or understand how they go about their lives. But they have that wilderness, and they have inexhaustible potatoes. They work hard and live easily day after day. They are like discarded plastic bags, discarded on the road, let the wind blow them around.
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