Varda, the director of pictures like "Vagabond" (1985) and the clear-eyed, nerve-buzzingly touching "Cleo From 5 to 7" (1961), has been a denizen of the French filmmaking scene since the late '50s. Early shorts like "L'Opéra-Mouffe" (1958), which glories in the sights and sounds of a neighborhood market from the point of view of a pregnant woman, suggest that she might be the missing link between surrealists like Jean Cocteau and new wave visionaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. In "The Gleaners and I," she follows a ragtag selection of gleaners as they go about their usual routine. Gleaners are defined here as people who pick up usable food or goods that others have no use for, whether that means salvaging rejected fruits and vegetables after the harvest or scavenging discarded furniture curbside.

Varda's inspiration for the movie, as she explains in the narration, was an 1857 painting by Jean-François Millet showing women in a wheat field, stooping to pick up the remnants of the harvest. The painting, a large but modest picture rendered in glowing golden browns, is the touchstone for the film, and it's oddly galvanizing: The action in the painting (embodied wholly in the curved forms of the women laborers), as in the movie, is gentle but never static. Both Varda and Millet show a smoldering desire for constant motion, a delight in moving forward, but never so quickly that a telling detail -- whether it's a charmingly heart-shaped potato or a stray shaft of wheat -- might be missed. As lovely as it is to start something new, there's also plenty of beauty in bringing an endeavor to a natural and complete closure.

Varda's filmed essay combines her own voice-over narration with images drawn from Paris and the French countryside. (The movie was shot on digital video, but unlike so many DV pictures, it looks casually steeped in richness instead of washed out.) She speaks with gleaners who show up in a potato field, post-harvest, to pick up the knobby misfits left behind by the farmers, most of which are still perfectly edible -- just not pretty and choice enough to bring to market. She talks with gleaners who forage out of necessity (like the gangly, balding, alcoholic Frenchman who looks as if he's carrying the sorrows of both hemispheres in the bags under his eyes) and those who do it almost out of a sense of social justice, people who are grounded in the sturdy conviction that good food should never be wasted (like the cheerful chef of a highly rated restaurant who's adamant about picking, not buying, his own herbs).

She follows an artist who scours the streets on trash day for found treasures to incorporate into his art, and an articulate and well-educated gentleman who strolls the streets after the open-air markets have closed, seeking discarded fruits and loaves of bread that spill out of busted crates and torn bags like pirates' treasure.

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