One Paragraph Movie Review: The Gleaners and I

One hundred and eighty-second film: The Gleaners and I, a French documentary about people who pick up what others leave behind. This thing meanders from art galleries to garbage bins, scrap heaps to apple orchards, and generosity to self-indulgence, to tell us about waste and resourcefulness in equal measure. It stops itself from being too enjoyable by being partly about how quirky Agnes Varda the filmmaker is, and is more likely than most films to make you think about washing your hands the entire time you’re watching it, but its goodness is in the fact that Varda seems to have scavenged bits of story and happened-upon recently-discarded characters herself. Oh, that’s probably on purpose, huh. Make a film about gleaners by picking through the corners of France. Interesting and charming in bits, I remain annoyed by documentaries that mistakenly assume I’m as interested in the life of the storyteller as I am in the story. I’m not. Two and a half sandy storm oysters out of five.