April 28, 2007

Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000)

3/5

Agnès Varda, the biggest female director of the French New Wave, continues to make movies that still have the feel of French New Wave in them. It was clearly low-budget and exceedingly self-referential, and lacked a traditional story arc. The movie is a free-form documentary about gleaners. Yes, the topic is a bit unconventional and is perhaps one of the film's biggest detractors. After all, what do I care about gleaners? But it has some extremely insightful relationships to lots of different things. The movie has no central objective or goal; it is exploratory in nature. That makes it extremely interesting and surprising, but also hinders it. I felt there was a lot of repetition, and despite its 80-minute running time, the movie feels like it takes forever because of the lack of organization. However, there are some very nice compositions and provocative ideas sprinkled randomly throughout the movie. Bottom line: interesting, but why am I watching this? For an excellent free-form documentary that is much more inventive, creative, and fun, I wholeheartedly recommend Orson Welles's F for Fake.

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0247380/