The film has been nominated for a best documentary Oscar.
She’s an 89-year-old French cinema legend with failing vision. He’s a 33-year-old photo-muralist with a large-scale photo printer built into his van. Together they have made the ultimate art-buddy road movie, creating portrait murals along the way.
Faces Places (French title: Visages, villages) brings together Agnés Varda and JR, artists from different generations who find beauty in quotidian details. The film kicks off the Spring 2018 schedule at the UW Cinematheque, with screenings on Friday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 5 p.m.
Varda’s career dates back to French New Wave classics including Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962). JR’s career includes a 2011 TED Prize, which funded a global participatory art project, Inside Out. The two artists playfully alternate narrating their adventure, quickly summarizing how they met and agreed to collaborate. They hop in JR’s Inside Out van, which looks like a large Leica camera, and head to the French countryside.
The film celebrates faces, places and the potential of photography to capture both. The mural subjects are often caught off guard by the impact of their images, which reminds us never to underestimate or abandon the power of art.
In an old mining town, Varda and JR plaster historical images of miners on the sides of now-abandoned houses. This provokes deeply engraved memories of hardship among the villagers, including a woman who had refused to abandon her home. When Varda and JR affix a large close-up of that woman onto her own house, it becomes a monument to her pride and perseverance.
The shared narration gives Faces Places a slightly different tone than Varda’s other personal essays, The Gleaners and I (2000) and The Beaches of Agnes (2008). In those films, Varda more fully integrates personal observations about her own life and growing old. JR, on the other hand, reveals little about his interior life. He occasionally serves as a foil for Varda, and asks her about death as they visit Henri Cartier-Bresson’s grave. But most often their cameras point outward, at the people they meet on their journey.
The loose, episodic structure repeats the mural-making process but also develops thematic threads. A close-up of a fish eye at a market segues to a close-up of Varda’s eye at a medical exam. Eyeglasses then provide a contrast between the two artists: Varda insists that subjects remove their glasses, but JR steadfastly refuses to remove his. JR reminds Varda of another colleague with a penchant for dark glasses: director Jean-Luc Godard, who agreed to take them off in the silent film that appears in Cleo from 5 to 7. Godard himself becomes a motif, as Varda and JR race through the Louvre, inspired by Godard’s Band of Outsiders, in an effortlessly exhilarating sequence.
A planned visit to Godard provides a touching capstone for Varda and JR’s collaboration. The degree to which the visit and its outcome are staged for the camera is irrelevant, because Varda and JR have already effectively blurred the line between living life and making art.
