Trash, art, and two movies

Agnès Varda’s 2000 essay film The Gleaners and I follows the legendary Left Bank filmmaker’s investigation into the history of gleaning, of the lives of those who stoop, who pick up what’s left behind, who scour the fields (or markets, or back alley trash cans) for needlessly wasted food (or objects) after the harvesters (or grocers, or restaurateurs) have taken what they’ve deemed worthy or saleable. Grains, fruit and vegetables from the fields, meat and fish from the refuse in urban spaces. Potatoes too large, too small, too oddly shaped, apples less than conventionally photogenic. Meat or dairy products tossed out on their “best before” dates that just a simple, good, critical sniff will tell you are still perfectly edible. (Varda is invited into homes to see these foods rescued from rot and prepared for eating, thus certain sequences of the film play out like some marvelous hobo cooking show.) Stoves and refrigerators left in the street are resurrected, if not for their intended use than for the purpose of storage or art. In paintings, such as Millet’s 1857 Des glaneuses, which features prominently in the film, gleaners were depicted as working in groups. Yet, while she finds gleaning couples and gypsy caravans in her search (which takes her to several regions of rural France, as well as the streets of Paris), many of Varda’s modern-day gleaners seem to be solitary, perhaps because the practice has become less and less socially acceptable, and in some cases a punishable offense.

More than a decade after its celebrated premiere, The Gleaners and I endures in part because it remains the definitive cinematic document on its field of study, but also because of the potency and allure of its highly personal, idiosyncratic approach, which stresses the filmmaker’s identification with her subjects. The film is dependent on what Varda encounters in her search, and what she’s able to produce with whatever she’s found, which is to say that Varda also gleans, but with a camera, specifically what was then the latest, most lightweight consumer camcorder, which she utilizes brilliantly. In Varda’s capable hands, hand-held contributes to the handmade, artisanal quality of The Gleaners and I. Hand-held also prompts a literal study of Varda’s hands, which reveal her age (she was in her early 70s at the time) in a manner that her curiosity, energy and tirelessly playful attitude do not. The so-called “grandmother of the French New Wave” is a mother of invention. Filmmaking is generally an art of deletion, or reduction, and The Gleaners and I is indeed well edited and fleetly paced, yet Varda nonetheless seems always ready to forge something valuable from what would conventionally seem discardable. (Anyone who’s seen the film will remember the wonderful “dance of the lens cap.”) She likes it when animals block the country roads, because she invites surprise. “A clock without hands is my kind of thing,” she says at one point in her running narration. (The soundtrack also features jazz and Francophone hip-hop.) Thus this homage to the marginalized and their resourcefulness reaches the heights that it does because the author of the film herself, while hardly marginal, represents the epitome of creative resourcefulness.

It could be one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this sprawling landfill (the world’s largest) that lies outside Rio de Janeiro, a place where refuse coats the earth so that earth itself remains unseen (as though refuse is earth, is soil and sediment). Refuse forms the substance of everyday life for Jardim Gramacho’s inhabitants, a population comprised of scavenger birds and human beings, workers sifting through the refuse for items to be resold or reused, from recyclable raw materials to clothes to food. These workers are the definition of marginal, surviving off of what the rest of us discard. Waste Land penetrates the world of Gramacho through the very special lens provided by Vik Muniz, whose series of mammoth portraits of Gramacho workers, crafted in collaboration with his subjects out of the very garbage they work in, constitutes the Brazilian-American artist’s most ambitious and visionary project to date.

The film, co-credited to João Jardim, Karen Harley and Lucy Walker (who recently helmed Countdown to Zero, a chilling documentary about nuclear weapons), is partly about Muniz, his life and methods. As much as is the case with any visual artist, Muniz’s work is tremendously tactile, his insistence on the alignment of materials and subject matter makes an immeasurable impression on you when you share the same physical space. The experience of seeing the work in two dimensions fails to do it justice. Yet the film’s unique access to Muniz’s process enriches our response to the work in a unique manner, whether or not we’re able to see it in the flesh. I only wish this process wasn’t conveyed at times through stiff, seemingly scripted exchanges, not to mention the occasional activist platitude (and I wish it didn’t have to be accompanied, which is to say overwhelmed, by Moby’s music). Waste Land is in any case more emphatically about Gramacho, about its diverse people, whose dignity and perseverance in a lifestyle cloaked in shame is intensely moving, and whose individual stories are of the utmost social relevance. So whatever reservations I have about shouldn’t be mistaken for discouragement from watching its truly extraordinary narrative unfold.

This piece was written in response to Metro Cinema's inspired Reel Waste series, which runs from May 8th thru the 11th.

That's the way I Am Love goes

The folding Paris of Inception is impressive and all, but does it or anything else in cinemas this summer have anything on the rapturous images of spot-lit haute cuisine, lustful bodies entwined in sun-soaked idyll, or the magnificent architectures of Italian cities and Tilda Swinton’s face found in Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love? Does it say something about the tendencies of grand spectacle in today’s adult fare that the beauty, scale and ecstatic reveries of I Am Love finally feel like a bit of a beard for a story that’s arguably even more ridiculous than that of Inception? Whatever the case, I’m hardly immune to this stuff, so please take my critical reservations with a grain of the finest sea salt gathered from the shores of France.

It opens in wintry Milan, where the snow is virginal and cozily all-enveloping and causes no chill. The family of an aging textiles magnate gathers for his birthday. The house is a labyrinth of luxury. As dinner is served we tour the Recchi family photos, the dusk-lit furniture, the collections of Morandis. After the meal the patriarch rises to speak, the only illumination being the hard light bouncing off the long dining table, an ominously glowing centerpiece around which all are seated for a surprise announcement. The old man declares that he shall promptly retire and leave his empire under the care of not only his son but also his grandson Edoardo (Flavio Parenti)—apparently it takes two normal men to replace this titan of industry. You might presume the younger Recchi was selected to counter the elder with a modern sensibility toward business. In fact, it’s dad who will soon gallop toward globalization—and immediately thereafter to the bank—while the son clings to the past and his probably idealized memories of gramps lunching daily with the sweaty labourers. As I Am Love continues, Edoardo proves to be hopelessly, even tragically, out of step with the events transpiring either openly or clandestinely around him.

The other, more discreet inciting incident in I Am Love’s riveting first act is the late arrival of Edoardo’s new friend Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), another son of money, another naïve dreamer. He shows up to drop off a little something he prepared—Antonio turns out to be an inspired chef—before slipping away again into the night. Edoardo says he fell in love with Antonio—manly, Italian, platonic love, lest you get any funny ideas—after he tried his cooking. A similar sequence unfolds for Emma (Swinton), Edoardo’s beatific, hyper-organized, elegantly tailored, Russian-born mother, whose life becomes altered by Antonio’s visionary prawns, bathed in warm light, fresh herbs and glistening olive oil. Food is foreplay, followed by spontaneous shoplifting, and I Am Love, charging forward not only on the legs of Guadagnino’s colour-rich, zoom-drunk, almost cubist approach to coverage, but also the heart-pounding rush of the John Adams pastiche score, whisks Emma and the rest of us away to a hidden paradise of earthly delights straight out of Lady Chatterley.

High style locks into step with dizzy romance in I Am Love, and as long as Emma and Antonio’s erotic frolicking remains hidden from the twin forces of judging outsiders and sober storytelling, Guadagnino’s immaculate mise en scène, a glorious throwback to the heights of mid-century Hollywood melodrama—especially the films of Douglas Sirk—and mid-century European art cinema—especially the films of Luchino Visconti—carries us along on operatic waves of alluring symmetry that discourage consideration as to how deeply silly some of this feels. Then the third act starts and that silliness shoots up from below I Am Love’s delicate crust, delivering a combo-plate of familial apocalypse and overwrought wish fulfillment. The joys of I Am Love flutter ravishingly before our senses for a solid 90 minutes or so, but the pains of I Am Love burp upward in the last 30 and continue long after you’ve left the theatre. Should we recklessly throw ourselves into this fatty feast even if it all feels rather flimsy in the afterglow? Of course.

Half-baked: Julie & Julia

We start with two Americans in postwar Paris, Julia (Meryl Streep) and Paul Child (Stanley Tucci), ardent foodies and happy in mid-life love, swooning over the richness of their new culinary and cultural digs while Paul shows his photos and continues his diplomatic career and Julia figures out what to do with her life between mouth-watering meals and afternoon delights—healthy appetites in the kitchen are matched, we learn, in the bedroom. Tucci’s terrific as always while Streep goes beyond deft impersonation, at her comic best and captivatingly sensual in a goofy sort of way. So far, so good. Or at the very least effortlessly diverting. If only it weren’t for the other half of the movie.

Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia isn’t a bio-pic about Julie Child but rather an attempt to craft a diptych from two separate stories of self-realization, that of Child’s discovery of her finesse with cuisine and charisma with instruction and of Queens-based Julie Powell (Amy Adams) and her discovery that maybe she really is the writer she always dreamed she’d be. To say that the former trajectory overshadows the latter would be a gross understatement. Child is a beloved and singular cultural icon and influential author. Powell started a hit blog based on following Child’s recipes. More to the point, Streep and Tucci’s portrait of marriage is moving, complex and resonant, bursting with unspoken negotiations between lovers who each convey an ample sense of history both separately and as a unit. The sense of togetherness found between Adams and Chris Messina, who pays Julie’s amiably Tony Danza-like husband Eric, is by contrast vacuous, propped up by tedious boilerplate squabbles and cuddling on the couch. It doesn’t help that Julie herself, characterized here as openly self-centered and seemingly without much of anything of her own to say, is basically insufferable. And it takes some pretty lousy writing to make Amy Adams insufferable.

The concept of Julie & Julia is, I think, inherently flawed, and Ephron’s method of connecting Child’s memoir My Life in France with Powell’s book is largely facile and undernourished. Their stories evoke parallels in only the most obvious ways, and Ephron has a tough time sculpting a satisfying movie out of either of them. The imbalance is exacerbated by stereotypical romanticizing of Paris and dismissal of dreary old Queens, which, granted, is hardly the most beautiful of the five boroughs but is not without its appeal either. Julie & Julia seems all too content to stay on the surface of things, to be all glaze and no filling, and it largely comes down to Streep, Tucci and a few other stellar costars to make this at least half of a good movie.