From the perspective of a traveler, Varda starts from her small home like a cat's nest, and starts from a history book about the gleaners, and guides the audience to embark on a journey of "gleaning" with her lens.
I really like how she tells the story in the first person and makes the audience look at herself from a third-person perspective.
Although the name of the film is The Gleaners, which refers to Miller's painting, what Varda wants to say is the Gleaners that exist widely in France. And the picture scroll she showed us of the scavengers undoubtedly revealed the situation of French society and the attitude towards scavengers that existed in French culture, which was different from other cultures. The French do not associate relics with dignity. On the contrary, many relicers are proud of what they have done. For them, relics are a manifestation of thrift and virtue. There is a sentence that impressed me very much: "We are not afraid of getting our hands dirty, and we can wash our hands when they are dirty."
Varda interviewed many lawyers and asked them about policies and regulations on the rights of collectors, so the film has a long section that feels like It is a public welfare film that appeals and defends legitimate rights and interests. But often at this time, the old lady suddenly stretched out her dry and wrinkled old hands in front of the camera on a whim, reminding the audience that this is a journey of mine. A documentary filmed by two veterans.
When the old lady was running around the city, she liked to observe the big trucks next to her. She said that she liked to be like a child, to see which big truck was overtaken, and she liked to stretch out her old hand and circle the huge truck into it. Her unrequited heart is very shocking to me. In addition, she has all kinds of childlike hobbies, such as heart-shaped potatoes, clocks without pointers, etc., and then she will look at these picked up "rags" and post about art and romance 's explanation. While collecting these gadgets, she seems to imply to the audience that the collectors are all artists of life, they all have a heart like a child, and their lives are more fun than ordinary people.
At the end of the film, it ends with the painting of the gleaner to achieve the effect of echoing the beginning and the end.
What I don't like in the film is the camera that Varda holds in his hand. The picture quality is really bad, and it's a headache to watch. The other is the soundtrack. (We know that the soundtracker is also a scavenger hunter.) Although it fits the atmosphere of the film very well, it also has the nondescript little literary feeling of French movies, but it is really unpleasant.
Based on the above, it is still worth seeing, and it is a good resource for understanding the corner of the French bottom society.
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