Visages villages

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."

I can't say that I completely agree with the level of acclaim this film has gotten, but for the most part, it remains the type of documentary film I love- very observational, very experimental, and free-flowing in its expression of art, love, and other positive emotions. The film is edited very well, and although I didn't really connect with every single piece of story told on screen, I got to enjoy the film as a whole and everything it amounted to. For an acquired taste, but definitely recommended.

I was lucky to get to see this wonderful film on the big screeen - a treatment it justly deserves. JR is a master artist and Varda needs to introduction - she was a brilliant light in the world of cinema. I took great emotion in each of the locales and the art pieces they made together. This is a wonderful and lovely film which gets better on repeated viewings.

Prolific and delightful Agnès Varda teams up with the celebrated photographer J.R. on a road trip through rural France. JR, well known for his photography murals, this time mainly focuses on the images of rural French working class, but the conversations between the two artists, touch on other themes that are equally interesting to follow.

Faces Places is one of those disarmingly charming films that are hard not to like, but its main theme, maybe too easy to digest, can make you peckish for a bit more challenge by the time the film is over.

"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.