Agnes Varda

Film: Cleo de 5 a 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7); Sans Toit ni Loi (Vagabond)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on rockin’ flatscreen (Cleo) and on laptop (Vagabond).

So let’s talk for a moment about Agnes Varda, a director I’d never heard of three years ago who has, since that time, become one I like quite a bit. Both of today’s films come from her, but as is frequently the case when looking at the films of a particular director, they have more in common than just who directed them. Both of these films deal in a specific way with women who are lost in some way, women who seem to be searching for something they are unable to obtain.

The first, Cleo de 5 a 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7) is in many ways the more explicit in terms of meaning and searching. Cleo (Corinne Marchand) is a pop singer with a couple of successful singles being played on the radio. However, she has been ill of late, and is particularly worried about a series of tests recently done by her doctor. The is to get the results of those tests later in the day. The film opens as she is having her tarot cards read. It’s important to pay close attention to all of the readings that are done here, because they accurately follow the plot of the film (more on this in a bit). The news she gets from the fortune teller is not good, and when she leaves, the fortune teller confides in us that she has seen cancer in Cleo, and that she is doomed.

Petty Little Things

Film: Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I knew 15 minutes in to this one that I was in for a rough ride. Actually, I knew it sooner. I knew it before the credits had finished running that the two hours or so I spent watching this film were going to cause me no end of pain. I was mildly buoyed by the fact that, as a wonder, I enjoyed Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, but it’s evident that his follow up (by all accounts assisted significantly by his wife Agnes Varda), Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort) is a much more traditional musical. Instead of having people sing everything, people break out into song at scripted times, and there’s never a surprise of when the next song is going to come. There is quite literally at least one in every scene.

I’m struggling to find a way to describe this film that sums it up as closely as I can without too many words. The best I’ve come up with is that, aside from the fact that there is a plot to carry us from one end of the film to the other, it’s very much like watching the opening dance sequence from an Austin Powers movie for two hours. Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) walks down the street, and suddenly it’s a choreographed dance number complete with acrobats and people in matching outfits spinning around. I’ll give it that it’s quite a spectacle, but it also really hurts my head.

Let’s see if I can summarize in a single paragraph. We have twins named Delphine and Solange (real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorleac) who respectively teach ballet and write music. They’re bored with Rochefort and want to go to Paris where they are convinced they will both become stars. Solange meets with a man named Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli) who promises to introduce her to a successful American songwriter named Andy Miller (Gene Kelly). Dame is unaware that Solange is the daughter of his former fiancée, Yvonne (Danielle Darrieux), who left him because she didn’t want to be known as Madame Dame (essentially, Mrs. Lady). He is also unaware that Solange and Delphine’s younger brother is his son.

Damn. It’s going to take another paragraph. Also thrown into this mess are two carnies named Bill (Grover Dale) and Etienne (George Chakiris) who suddenly need a new dance act for their display at a fair, so Yvonne sends them to her daughters. Also, there’s a young artist named Maxence (Jacques Perrin) who seeks after his feminine ideal, which looks a hell of a lot like Delphine. Oh, and no one sees or bumps into each other, except when they can’t know each other. Andy Miller and Solange run into each other and fall for each other without knowing who the other is. One of the other two couples happens before our eyes, and we’re left with the certainty of the third as the film closes.

All of that is part and parcel of a musical, and while it’s hardly my favorite genre, I can handle it. But there are aspects of this film that simply hurt my brain from start to finish. First, everyone in this film ranks among the most superficial characters it has ever been my displeasure to encounter in any medium. Seriously. The two dancers who leave Etienne and Bill in the lurch do so because they meet a pair of sailors. One of them leaves because Bill’s eyes aren’t blue—if he’d had blue eyes, she’d have stayed with him. Yvonne leaves the father of her son without a word and lies to him about moving to the Pacific coast in Mexico simply because she doesn’t like his last name. For a film that is intended in many ways to be a feel-good, it presents us with terrible characters who (at least for me) cause a wrinkle of the nose and a look of displeasure rather than a sigh and a fluttering heartbeat. Maxence has fallen in love with his feminine ideal without knowing anything about her—he’ll fall for her regardless because of what she looks like. Doesn’t matter what she’s like (he says as much multiple times); if she’s blonde and pretty and looks like his picture, she’s the girl for him. She could be a princess or she could be an axe murderer.

Which brings me to my second problem—there’s an axe murderer on the loose in Rochefort, a plot point that seems to come out of nowhere about an hour into the film. Suddenly, one morning, Yvonne picks up the paper and sings us the news that a woman was brutally hacked apart a few blocks away. And she’s smiling when she does it. And then Maxence walks over to check out the crime scene and calmly mentions to Solange (who happens to be standing there) that he prefers blondes to redheads, but that her being a redhead doesn’t mean he’d hack her apart with an axe. Good Lord, that’s messed up.

I don’t want to give the impression that there is nothing here, though. Certainly the presence of Gene Kelly livens things up tremendously, and while it might be difficult on its face to allow for the romance between the 55-year-old Kelly and the mid-20s Dorleac, it works to a certain extent. Kelly, in his favor, looked a good 10 or 15 years younger than his actual age here. But his dance numbers feel subdued compared with the others in this film, no doubt in part because of his age.

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort also succeeds in its overall look. It’s a riot of color and splendor, with couples at the end pairing off in essentially matching outfits, an indication that their love for each other was meant to be. And yet, it’s perhaps a little overboard here as well. Many people throughout the film appear to wear matchy-matchy outfits, including an entire troupe of people wearing grey jackets and pants, white calf-high boots and color-coordinated shirts and ties. It feels so planned, in part because it is so obviously and completely planned. It’s a nice visual effect, but entirely artificial.

It could easily be argued that I’ve completely overthought this film; it’s not a film to be analyzed but a film to simply watch and fall in love with. But so much of it feels so off that I can’t help myself. These people are petty, vain, and self-serving. Why do I want them to get a happy ending? Honestly, I’d have rather seen a musical about the axe murderer.

Why to watch Les Demoiselles de Rochefort: Bright, shiny colors.
Why not to watch: Vast parts of this film truly make no sense.

Dumpster Diving

Film: Les Glaneures et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

We live in a world of plenty. I live in a community that makes at least part of its income through farming. Despite the fact that it looks fairly suburban and despite the fact that there is a large Midwestern university within a couple of miles of my house, there is corn or soybeans within 15 minutes of my house in literally every direction. This begs the question of why so many people go hungry not just in the world but in the U.S.

Les Glaneures et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) explores the history and phenomenon of gleaning, or going through the fields of produce after the farm machinery and farmers have taken their yield. This film follows a number of gleaners—those who glean from necessity and those who glean because they enjoy it. Additionally, the film shows a collection of people who glean in urban environments.

This privation and necessity of gleaning is juxtaposed with the tremendous waste that occurs in farming. Filmmaker Agnes Varda talks to potato farmers who deliberately throw away a portion of their harvest every year because the potatoes are misshapen, or damaged or shockingly too large for the size that supermarkets want to sell. These extra potatoes, tones of them, are dumped in fields and left to rot, and so the poor and hungry pick among them for food.

We also see vineyards in Burgundy. Here, for a wine to be considered vintage, only a certain number of bottles can come from each plot. The extra grapes, rather than being picked and sold or gleaned, are destroyed.

Not everyone in the film gleans from necessity. A chef—the youngest in history to earn two stars in the Michelin Guide, gleans herbs and apples on a hillside. Partly, he says, it is to save money. Without gleaning, he would spend $30 per day on savory alone. He also gleans because it gives him control over the produce he includes in the meals he cooks. Through gleaning, he is able to determine for himself the freshness of his foods and regulate the quality of his meals.

Among the more interesting characters we meet are a few artists who glean materials for their projects and one man who admits to having both a job and a social security number, but gleans 100% of his meals from dumpsters because he objects to the tremendous waste he sees in the streets. Too much food gets thrown away, he claims, and the waste is will destroy everything. He also claims that since he started gleaning all of his food from trash receptacles, he has not been sick. Another man who has a Master’s degree and now sells newspapers and magazines, gleans day-old bread from bakeries in the morning and fruits and vegetables from markets in the afternoon.

Next to all of this, the people who pick potatoes in fields and those who pull together pieces of refuse to make art, Varda experiments with her own relationship with gleaning as well as her own mortality. As she wanders through fields, she grabs potatoes for herself and arranges for a local foodbank to come and gather potatoes to feed those who need feeding. She wanders through an orchard of fig trees, eating overripe figs that were left on the trees because they had ripened past the point at which they could be candied.

In her own way, Varda also gleans her film both in the sense of picking up pieces that she sees and likes and takes with her, as well as in the more modern sense of the word. At the same time, the more she films and the more she sees, the more she understands this activity and the various reasons the people she meets have for gleaning. Similarly, as a viewer, we glean in the same way, understanding the behavior that at first seems so strange and foreign. In terms of objects taken home, she admits to a pair of chairs found discarded on the street. She also takes a clock without hands since she feels attuned to it—without hands, it no longer shows advancing time.

Les Glaneures et la Glaneuse is a film of surprising power and beauty. In showing the various attitudes and styles of gleaning, Varda has created a film that speaks to almost all segments of the population. We see those who prevent gleaning of their otherwise wasted crop as a form of protection for themselves. We see other farmers who allow the gleaning, saying that if their own pickers left the fruit, it would simply go to waste anyway. And through it all, there is the constant metaphor of gleaning as something we all do, picking pieces of experiences to remember, taking small parts of others along with us on our own journey.

This is a special film. Who would have known that a film that opens with people digging through dirt piles for potatoes would have such a particular magic and majesty?

Why to watch Les Glaneures et la Glaneuse: A surprisingly beautiful look at food and poverty, art and life.
Why not to watch: It’s a film about potatoes and junked furniture