Faces Places (2017): Art+Life = Wonderful!

Have you ever found yourself smiling, just from the pleasure of watching a beautiful (or sweet or charming) movie? Not in retrospect; I mean while you are watching it?  That was my experience a couple nights ago, as I watched Faces Places, the Oscar nominated documentary. Nor am I talking about a brief smile of recognition or reaction to a witty remark, a pratfall or a cute moment. I was smiling from the charming opening credits through roughly the first hour or more of this 89-minute picture. Something similar has happened for me with a few other movies in the past, but it’s quite a rare (and wonderful) thing.

It’s even more unusual to have such a reaction to a so-called documentary. But then Faces Places [a.k.a. Visages Villages] is not the usual journalistic sort of documentary. It’s made by two photographer/filmmakers, Agnes Varda and JR, about a little art project they concocted and conducted in 2016, and it’s as much a joint visual diary or memoir of their experience as it is a documentary of the art they created and the people they met along the way. Call it a road-picture.

Agnes Varda is the better known of the two. A towering figure in French, no – make that world cinema, Varda is sometimes referred to as the mother of the nouvelle vague (i.e. French new wave); in fact, her first works preceded the directorial debuts of Truffaut and Godard by several years; she is also one of the few women film makers in that movement, responsible for many highly regarded movies, both narrative and documentary, among them Cleo from 5 to 7 [Cleo de 5 a 7] (1962), Vagabond [Sans toit ni loi] (1985), The Beaches of Agnes [Les plages d’Agnès](2008). I confess that I have seen none of these, to my shame, but I intend to remedy that. My lack of previous exposure mattered not a whit with respect to my enjoyment of Faces Places.

JR is the pseudonym of a French artist/photographer/activist known for creating large blown-up images, frequently of ordinary folks, and pasting them in public places – walls of buildings, streets, industrial sites, whatever seems apt to him – often to draw attention to an issue or cause. In the US, he may be most famous for works displayed at the US-Mexican border such as the 70-foot-tall installation from September 2017 shown (below left), or Elmar, the 140-foot-long photo of a recent US immigrant, which he pasted onto the street at Flatiron Plaza in New York three years ago (below right).

 

Varda will be 90 in May; JR will be 35 in a few weeks. While they joke about their wide age difference, there is a clear and growing sense of simpatico between the two of them – one of the many charming aspects of Faces Places. In a conversation between these two seemingly disparate artists they discussed what led to the project that became this film.

Varda: It seemed clear that your habit of pasting big pictures of people up on walls, empowering them through size, and my habit of listening to them and spotlighting what they say, would lead to something.

JR: And we wanted to hit the road together. Neither Agnes or I had ever codirected a film before. … Agnes wanted to get me out of cities.

Varda:  That’s right, because you’re truly an urban artist. And I love the country. We quickly hit on the idea of villages. That’s where we’d meet people and that’s what happened. We took off in JR’s incredible photo truck. The truck’s the actor in the film, always putting on a show. … At any rate, we had fun driving around rural France in that truck. Going here and there. … As always in documentaries – and I’ve done lots of them – you have an idea; but before long chance enters into play – who you meet and who you know – and suddenly things congeal to focus on a specific person or place. Actually, we embrace chance, we enlisted it as an assistant!

JR:  We engage life too, since the film’s also the story of our encounter. We got to know each other through … the amusing experience of working as a duo. I’m learning to understand Agnès a little better, what she sees and how she sees it, and she’s also trying to understand my process.

OK, so I think you get the idea. They visit a former coal-mining town, farm villages, a little industrial town, the shipping city of Le Havre, detour to Paris, meet with a retired postman, a cafe waitress, goat farmers, dockworkers and their wives, factory workers, miners and others. In the coal mining town, they find a long row of miners’ brick homes, slated for demolition, all abandoned - save one in which resides an older woman who refuses to leave the only home she has ever known, like old Carl Fredericksen in the Pixar film Up (2009).

She and all the other interviewees (and photo subjects) in the film are treated with dignity, curiosity, empathy, warmth and grace.  All of the proceedings are conducted with a wonderful combination of enthusiasm, lightheartedness and creativity. The posting of the giant pictures on village buildings, water towers, and other available surfaces monumentalizes not so much the specific individuals, as individualism and a celebration of everyman. It’s not all triumph of the human spirit stuff – there are goats and fish too.

It’s hard to describe in words the sensations and emotions all of this evokes - you really have to see it - but “sweet”, “fascinating”, “heartwarming”, and “aesthetically thrilling” are a few that come to mind.  

Things get more personal along the way – the goats lead Varda to recall a photo of a dead goat on a beach she took in the 1950s, early in her career, leading to reminiscences about a friend, who used to model for her around that time, now deceased. One of her photos of him is blown-up and pasted onto an old German bunker fallen onto a beach near Normandy, now a giant cock-eyed monolith. The result is actually very beautiful, also an emotional experience for Varda, and by extension touching for us. Adding to this is the ephemeral nature of much of JRs public art: it’s washed away at the next high tide.

The famous and famously reclusive Jean-Luc Godard, with whom Varda and her (also famous) husband Jacques Demy had been pals, gets into the act near the end of Faces Places, in a fashion that poignantly brings the two director-stars of this adventure closer together – a fine ending to an exquisite film.

89 minutes       MPAA rating: PG (but of doubtful interest to young children)

Grade A+

Faces Places, initially released in the US in October 2017, has been re-released this week in a few select theaters with more coming online, I believe, in coming weeks. Check for a theater in your area HERE.  (Currently scheduled for dvd release on or about March 8).