Faces, Places

"Lyrical" best expresses with poetic simplicity the greatness of Faces Places, a documentary from French director Agnes Varda and street photographer, graffiti artist, JR. Together they create a song like film that immortalizes the French countryside and the people who work there.

Cruising in their van tricked out to look like a camera, they converse with and capture in photos goatherds, farmers, coal miners, factory workers, and cheese makers. By engaging their subjects with a sincere interest in what they do (Varda comes back a second time to connect with a lady whose principled tending of goats (not burning off young horns) appeals to the still formidable, principled director.

Varda and JR's blowing up the portraits to put on the sides of buildings, hills, ant trains not only ingratiates the artists with the subjects, but also figuratively comments on the director and photographer's ability to magnify the beauty of human nature. All photographers should hope for that impact.

A recurring motif about JR's unwillingness to remove his sunglasses (I identify) reminds Varda of her New-Wave friend, Godard, leading them to attempt to visit the famed director at the end of the film. Regardless of her success in connecting, Godard serves a touchstone for the genius of Varda and friends in the '60's just as JR helps make her just as relevant today at 88.

She's a remarkable grand dame, and although some have called her work "thrift-shop cinema," she and partner JR are savvy enough to win the 2017 Golden Eye for a documentary at Cannes. Best expressing her optimism and realism, she says about her death, "I'm looking forward to it. Because that'll be that." "That" is a body of work, the present doc included, that spans a half century of sublime cinema with immortality on its mind.

"Visages villages" (the English title is "Faces Places") is the last big screen film directed in 2017 by Agnès Varda in collaboration with photographer and mural artist JR. Until her death in 2019, she would make another TV movie dedicated to her own work and career. Maybe it was planned, maybe it wasn't, but the final two films form a duet. At the age of 89, "Visages villages" is an artistic end to her career as a director, while "Varda par Agnès" is the documentary finale, in which the director comments on her path in life and cinema. I dislike when movies are called "testaments". I guess Agnès Varda didn't like that label either. "Visages villages" is a beautiful film, a documentary that talks about France, its places and its people, but more than anything about the two filmmakers, one of whom is a little old lady, with failing eyesight and in need sometimes for a cane to walk, her hair dyed a little funny but sure like no other on the face of the planet, but certainly a lady who loved life, art and people and was determined to live intensely and create until her last breath. And so it was.

The film is a road movie with art and about art. JR invites Agnès Varda to a trip through the villages of France using his truck transformed into a photo studio and the production shop of huge posters based on the photos taken by the two. We are in the age of smartphones, but they still use the traditional Leika cameras. The posters are then glued to buildings, ruins, industrial structures, rocks, trains or trucks. Molded on the shapes of objects they begin a new double life - as structures or utility machines and as works of art. This original creative style practiced by JR meets the art of framing moving images whose master was Agnès Varda. The artistic effect is twofold. The black and white of the photos becomes an element in the color palette of Varda's images, who films with passion in open horizons reminiscent of 'Vagabond', one of her most beautiful films. The photographed characters enlarged at bigger-than-life sizes become giant witnesses of their own lives.

"Visages villages" is a special film in Agnès Varda's filmography, but also a continuation of some of the stylistic and social themes of her films, as well as of some biographical moments. The subjects photographed are, as in many of the previous films, people from 'Deep France' - a waitress at a bar, workers in the two shifts of a chemical plant, the last inhabitants of an abandoned mining settlement, a hornless goat breeder and a militant against cutting the horns of goats, the wives of unionized workers in the harbor of Le Havre. Some of the people and artists whose trajectories intersected with Agnes's life appear - in the image or in memory -: the photo of an old friend from his early youth will be pasted on a German bunker collapsed on a beach in Normandy, the two will visit the house of writer Nathalie Sarraute and the graves of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his wife, and will set an appointment with Jean-Luc Godard. Eventually, Agnes herself and JR, her traveling and creative companion, become characters. We witness the developing friendship between them, their dialogues about art and the people who create it, about age and about death. "Visages villages" is a beautiful documentary and more than that. I think at the end of the filming JR was a little in love with Agnes. We too.

Time seems to be moving faster with every passing decade, with a younger generation looming around the corner to put a fresh perspective on life, art and politics. Visages Villages introduces the gap between the old and the new, as director Agnes Varda and photographer J.R. journey through rural France and form an unlikely friendship along the way.

J.R. and Agnes steal the show with their engaging philosophical chats and heartwarming intergenerational chemistry, no writer could've written a script like this. As we follow them on their travels from town to town, a deeper connection is developed not just between the two artists but between the townspeople they leave a mark on, literally. Both retrospective and introspective, Visages Villages challenges the viewer to bridge the generational gap with respect and gratitude but also to shape what has already come, to better what is to be. This thoroughly sweet watch will leave you with a gigantic smile on your face, and is likely to remain as indelible as the art work that is displayed.

89-year-old filmmaker Agnès Varda ("The Beaches of Agnès") said, "I have a nice relationship with time, because the past is here, you know? I've spent time, if I have something of my past, I'll just make it, nowadays, I make it now and here." Varda makes both past and present come alive in Faces Places (Visages Villages), 89-year-old filmmaker Agnès Varda ("The Beaches of Agnès") said, "I have a nice relationship with time, because the past is here, you know? I've spent time, if I have something of my past, I'll just make it, nowadays, I make it now and here." Varda makes both past and present come alive in Faces Places (Visages Villages), a life-affirming meditation on friendship, art, and mortality. Co-directed by JR ("Women are Heroes"), a 33-year-old hip French graffiti artist and photographer whom the director met in 2015, Varda and her companion make an unlikely couple. She stands out with her two-toned hair and diminutive stature and JR does a convincing Jean-Luc Godard ("Goodbye to Language") impersonation with his black fedora hat and dark sunglasses which Varda teases him about the entire film.

Both live life on the edges and do not live by the rules. "Chance has always been my best assistant," she says. Driving without any particular destination, they crisscross the French countryside in JR's van decorated to resemble a camera with a large lens on one of its sides. The travelers meet and take pictures of villagers, workers, and townspeople whom they immortalize with gigantic black and white portraits plastered on the sides of walls, old houses, container cargo, trains, and other objects. Playfully, Varda describes it like this, "We ended up with huge images of them after I made them express themselves. So it's a real documentary because we are careful about what they are, what they want to say. But also, we play our game, as being artists, making strange images or enjoying that people we meet becomes actors of our dreams."

The people they meet are former miners, waitresses, plant safety workers, truck drivers, and dockworkers and their wives in Le Havre. By himself on his 2,000 acre farm, a man laments the passing of the social aspects of farming, recalling how it was when three or four workers were always there for companionship. In other vignettes, a man and his son are responsible for ringing the church bell in a small village and farmers enjoy hand-milking horned goats, regretting that others cut off the goats' horns and do their milking with machines.Varda and JR also travel to an abandoned village which is suddenly filled with arriving well-wishers. They go to the Brittany seaside where she remembers the photographs she took of a young friend and fellow photographer during the mid-1950s, pasting an image of him reclining against a beach hut on a German bunker and telling JR how peaceful he looks resting there.

The slow pace of travel allows Agnès to confront other memories from her past, including a visit to a small cemetery where photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck are buried. After visiting JRs 100-year-old grandmother, JR asks her if she is afraid of dying. Varda answers in the negative. "That'll be that," she says." Reflecting on her relationship with the great director Jean-Luc-Godard, she recalls the time she spent with him, his then wife Anna Karina, and Varda's late husband, director Jacques Demy ("The Umbrellas of Cherbourg"). Agnès and her friend then travel to Switzerland to meet with Godard, bringing the director a gift of his favorite pastry but he is not home. Unfortunately, their only communication is an enigmatic message left on his window pane. In her only sense of irritation in the film, Varda uncharacteristically expresses deep feelings of hurt.

Faces Places is a quiet celebration of what is most important in life, simple pleasures of companionship and collaboration, of art made real and accessible, and of the divine in the commonplace. Varda said it best, "I know that the seaside represents the whole world", she remarked, "the sky, the ocean, and the earth, the sand. And it's like expressing where is the world. It's about a calm sea, a calm ocean, just a very, very discreet wave ending on the sand. And that's a landscape that touches me a lot. But I know that also people feel that, too." It is hard not to be touched by her presence.

Agnes Varda is probably the least pretentious and most accessible of the French New Wave directors. Unlike Jean-Luc Godard, who as an artist seems to have calcified recently into his worst characteristics -- pretension, abstraction and aloofness -- Varda seems only to grow more warm and charming with age. And her companion, the street artist JR, with his sheer youthful exuberance and eternal sunglasses, is a terrific counterbalance to her wisdom and reflection. Opposites attract!

JR runs through the Louvre, pushing Varda in a wheelchair, leaping over sofas, in a recreation of the scene in Band of Outsiders when the actors broke the record of running through the famous museum. Varda, while gazing over a herd of sheep, ruminates how the young active lambs on the outside of the circle are the ones leading the flock. And always, the faces. And the places. JR and Varda travel throughout rural France, pasting large photo printouts of people on walls. They talk, they tease each other, they meet interesting people. This movie is a love letter to creativity and art and people. A railroad worker asks Varda why she let JR paste her toes on the side of a train's petrol tank, and the first thing she says is, "For fun."