Continuing on with the 2022 S&S list, #63 is Goodfellas, which I’ve obviously seen before, and this is at #67. This is the second movie from Agnès Varda on the 2022 list, after having none on the 2012 list. But whereas Cléo from 5 to 7 was an obvious no-brainer “how was that not already on there?” choice, this one surprises me.

Part of the reason it’s surprising is that it’s a documentary, and the only other documentary on the list is Shoah, which is obviously a much weightier and more significant work. Here, Varda is going around with a digital camera and talking to gleaners — people who pick up the grain, fruits, or other things left behind after the harvest. The subject is considered loosely, so while she does talk to people who do traditional “walking the fields” gleaning, and to rural folk who talk about the lost traditions of gleaning, she also talks to more modern dumpster divers and freegans and junk artists.

It’s not a topic that’s intrinsically super-interesting to me, but Varda is a great documentarian and interviewer, in that her animating curiosity comes through clearly and makes things interesting. Some of her interest is about her topic, some of it is about her tools (this was released in 2000, and she’s extremely excited about having a lightweight digital video camera to use), and some of it is just a kind of whimsy — like the scene where they’re driving down a highway and she’s holding her hand in front of the camera to pretend to grab trucks off the road.

It’s an interesting watch, but fundamentally it’s doing the same thing she did in Faces Places — letting us hang out with this interesting woman as she pursues her curiosity and films any number of people and situations, pulling art out of the mundane by sheer force of attention. (And her musings on old age, present in both movies, feel more poignant in Faces Places when she’s in her late eighties than they do here in her early seventies.)

Taken as a movie, it’s easy to recommend. As a work on this list, though… well, I think I can make it make sense to me if I take it as a shorthand for her late-career documentaries. But personally, I’m more in line with the directors’ preferences — on their list, they also have two Varda films, but the second is Vagabond, my personal favorite of her works. But I’m sure that fans of documentaries feel like they get short shrift as it is, so having a second entry on the list is fair enough, and it really is a charming film, so hey.