Feb. 11 movie: The Gleaners and I. Lisa, Christa and I watched this French documentary about scavengers last night. It could have been fascinating, but (in my opinion of course) the movie's flow was almost completely destroyed by the director's lack of focus. She includes lengthy shots of herself brushing her hair, looking out the window of her car, filming her own hand in close-up, and so forth. There's even a sequence (I didn't time it but at least a minute) of the ground and a bouncing lens cap, because as she explained, she let the camera dangle but forgot to turn it off.
I wonder if the problem partly stemmed from the camera. She mentioned in the narration that she was using a digital camera for the first time, and how much she loved it. Maybe the lack of need for economy with film led to the excessive moments about driving in the car or the wrinkles on her hand or etc.
I suppose this meandering personal record could make a good movie too, but it sure as hell wasn't the movie I wanted to see last night. I opined that she should have titled it "The Gleaners and Me! Me! Me!" Lisa summed up the film's message as: "Look at my hand. I am aging. Oh right, gleaners."
It's too bad because the (ostensible) subject matter was fascinating. She talked to actual gleaners (people who go into fields after harvest and take food left behind by the farmers), junk collectors we'd call "dumpster divers" in the US, homeless people who eat out of garbage cans, even a couple of magistrates who explained the laws regarding agricultural gleaning and urban scavenging.
I wish that someone else would take all her raw footage, throw away the stuff about her hands, and make the movie The Gleaners and I should have been.
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