Leftovers
by Chris Dashiell

Gleaning - gathering food left on the fields after harvest - is an ancient tradition in Europe. In France, as we learn in Agnes Varda's endearingly personal film THE GLEANERS AND I, gleaning is protected by law, although the laws vary in different provinces, and with different crops. Varda was intrigued not only with this practice, but with all its echoes and implications - our attitudes and policies towards waste; our ideas about property, labor and sustenance; the dumpster-diving of the homeless in the cities; artwork based on "found" objects; our very relationship to objects and their utility (or lack of); and even the act of filmmaking itself, conceived as a gleaning of images from the passing, mortal world.

All these ideas spring from and lead back to the personal life and sensibility of the director herself, the only female member of the original French "New Wave," now in her seventies, and completely at ease in her mastery of the film medium. I was going to write "in command of her art," except that Varda's art is here all about openness, letting go, and letting the manifold aspects of life - even the accidental ones - enter and enliven the work. She spent a year touring France with her handheld camera, interviewing many gleaners, pickers, farmers and other property owners, urban scavengers, provacateurs and eccentrics, all the while seasoning her film with her own comments on art, feelings, travel, gleaning, and the increasing sense of her own mortality. With nothing to prove and no one to please but herself, she's produced a film of great humor, beauty, and tenderness - a record of life that in its seemingly formless method enchants the heart and mind.

The film begins, appropriately, with Millet's famous painting "The Gleaners." Reflections on the past glide into portraits of the present day. People arriving in cars to pick up piles of potatoes - the farmers only sell potatoes of certain shapes and sizes - Varda finds a hear-shaped one. Vineyards where pickers harvest the "second crop" of berries that arrive after harvest.There are even oyster gleaners - there is some difference of opinion among witnesses as to how far away from the oyster beds these gleaners have to be, or how many they're allowed to gather.

A lawyer is consulted - he stands in a field, the weeds coming up past the hem of his black robe, and explains the intracies of gleaning law, dating back to the Middle Ages. After the harvest is done in France, people have the right to take what they want, even from a greenhouse. Later we meet farmers who either allow the practice or not, depending - it would seem - on their temperament.

From there it is but a short leap to the survival of the homeless of the cities by living on the discarded food and objects of others. We meet one rollerblading Paris activist who eats nothing but dumpster food - not because he can't afford to buy his food, but for ecological and political reasons. He is against waste. At another point on her travels, Varda interviews the owner of a vineyard who turns out to be a descendant of E. J. Marey, one of the pioneers of motion pictures, and we get to see some of the films made from that great man's "rifle camera" - moving images of animals and people gleaned from the otherwise irrevocable past.

Varda's narration has one quality which is rarely associated with the documentary form - playfulness. She plays games of image perspective, with her hands and the trucks which are passing her as she drives on the highway. At one point she forgets to turn the camera off, and ends up with footage of the lens cap waving around above the ground as she walks. Does she throw the footage away? No - in the spirit of her subject, she leaves it in the film - it's the "dance of the lens cap." Nothing is insignificant, nothing is too important, life is short and sad and sweet, and everything has its time in the sun - or on film.

In our minds film has come to mean a massive undertaking involving millions of dollars and a complex coordination of labor and resources that would intimidate all but the most determined artist. But here Agnes Varda has fashioned a beautiful, many faceted little jewel, reflecting a profound sense of life that extends into the spiritual, emotional and political domains - with little more than a handheld camera, a tank of gas, and....

Her genius.

There's a leftover feeling to Dominik Moll's WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY... The spectacle of a menacing stranger, a personified Id, invading the safe haven of a bourgeois household, seems left over from Claude Chabrol. The careful agony of built up suspense, leading to sudden shock, is left over from Alfred Hitchcock. But while there's nothing new here, Moll has managed to make something worthwhile from the scraps.

Michel (Laurent Lucas) is on the road with his wife and two little daughters, making his way to the rustic house where they spend their summers. At a rest stop he runs into an old high school classmate named Harry (Sergi Lopez). Michel doesn't actually remember Harry. But Harry remembers Michel, in alarming detail, and he especially admires Michel's youthful literary work - a poem and unfinished story - that was published in the school journal but long since forgotten, along with all of his former ambition to write.

Harry, as one expects in this genre, and despite the lack of plausibility, manages to get himself invited, along with his inarticulate girlfriend, to the summer home. He is a very friendly fellow, determined to help his old friend get through what seems to be a stressful time in his life and his marriage, and as it happens he has plenty of money. Enough, for instance, to buy Michel an SUV, without being asked, and even in the face of refusal. Harry's generosity extends also to the realm of advice. He believes that Michel needs to cut himself free from bothersome practical necessities and relationships, if he is to regain the creative spark he seems to have lost.

Well, you can guess where it's all leading. Harry idolizes Michel, and when you scratch an idolator you often find a stalker. Or worse.But the film induces a few shivers down the spine anyway, and a lot of the credit goes to Lopez. His smiling, bright-eyed Harry, the image of genial concern, is a truly frightening creation. The frozen mask of friendship is more disturbing than any open evil.

The French title translates to: "Harry, a friend who is here to help you." The film plays on the sense of frustration with receiving unwanted attentions - unwanted help that only leads to more problems, and therefore more "help." The screenplay also parodies adolescent ideas of liberation from social constraint - for horror effect - which is really the one element of the film that is an original take on the Hitchcock/Chabrol format. "Horror" in this context means psychological horror, rather than the schlock horror genre, which has usurped that word. Having your life taken over and disrupted in terrible ways, without even knowing it, is horrible.

If you can buy into the film's premise, you'll be creeped out as much as I was. With a Friend Like Harry... is not deep. It certainly doesn't resonate at the level of its older models. But it does its job without overplaying its hand, and that's not a common virtue these days. In addition, the ending is over-the-top in an unexpected and agreeable way.

Tragedy? Love story? Historical drama? Anti-death penalty film? THE WIDOW OF SAINT PIERRE aspires to be all of these, and never completey succeeds in being any of them. Based on an actual court case, the story concerns an illiterate sailor (Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica in his first major acting role) who commits a drunken murder on the eponymous island off Newfoundland, sometime in the 1840s. The court condemns him to death, but there is no guillotine in the tiny French colony, so they must wait until one is sent from France before they can carry out the sentence.

In the meantime, the prisoner is in the charge of the garrison commander (Daniel Auteuil). The captain's independent-minded wife (Juliette Binoche) then proceeds to take an interest in the welfare of the condemned, and the captain is so in love with her that he indulges her desire to take the prisoner out to perform various labors in the village. Under her influence, the condemned man undergoes a spiritual transformation, and eventually wins the love and respect of the townsfolk, who then become adamantly opposed to his upcoming execution.

Veteran director Patrice Leconte, instead of going for the usual "sweeping pageantry" approach to historical drama, employs a style of raw immediacy, and succeeds in evoking the dank, claustrophobic atmosphere of a remote colonial outpost. The performances are natural. The plot is given time to develop without too much emphasis or explanation. Kusturica is quite good.

At the film's center, however, contrary to what one might expect, is the curious relationship between the captain and his wife. It is curious because it stands out so radically from the provincial world of military society in which the captain moves. Auteuil's character is a model of stubborn loyalty to his wife, her passions and ideals, even her mistakes. His love for her, in other words, is so intense that it supercedes all merely practical concerns. This romantic idea is unfortunately not realized well enough to convince. Captain and wife interact and make love, but we don't know them.

Binoche brings a lot of spirit to her role - she is never dull to watch. It's just that her character is an enigma, and her choices have a puzzling effect rather than the tragic inevitability that Leconte seems to be aiming for. In addition, the chemistry with Auteuil is simply not there.

Claude Faraldo's script does not have a simple aim. The threads of meaning are ambivalent, and that's to his credit. Noble actions may lead to ends that were not wished. But since the central relationship doesn't convince, the conflicts at the story's heart don't achieve the desired effect. The picture is not a failure, really - it takes you somewhere and keeps your attention. It's just that there's not enough life in the characters to make it really memorable.

 

©2001 Chris Dashiell
CineScene