THE GLEANERS AND I is a beautiful documentary by Agnes Varda, the grand old lady of the French New Wave. Varda drove around France by herself with a hand-held digital camera, filming and interviewing gleaners and pickers in the country and dumpster scavengers in the city. Working with two year's of raw footage, what she did in the editing room is both simple and complicated, both plain and transcendent. Quiet, rambling, playful, and digressive, THE GLEANERS AND I succeeds not only in giving us information about an interesting topic but also in creating a meditation on the nature of art, a visual display of the wastefulness of modern consumer society, a portfolio of vivid and humanistic portraits of people who show again and again how amazingly varied in every respect the poor and homeless are, and an equally vivid and humanistic self-portrait of the artist as an old woman nearing death but still searching for beauty. What Varda did is clever -- for two years she gleaned the gleaners -- but also heartfelt, modest, unpretentious, free of artifice, and during the last ten minutes, emotionally moving.

My rating on the Watson scale: 5.5 (I'd give it a 6 if it weren't for the slight jitteriness of the hand-held camera, which bothered my eye in a couple of scenes when Varda is walking as she films her subjects.).