FACES PLACES (2017)
Directed by Agnés
Varda and JR
Cohen Media Group, 89
minutes, PG (in French with subtitles)
★★★★★
Faces Places will
restore your faith in humanity and you won't need a word of French to fall in
love with its humanity. On the surface it's little more than the documentary of
a road trip between two improbable buddies and a choreographed one at that.
But, oh, what a road trip and, oh, what buddies.
Our protagonists are 89-year-old Agnès Varda and 34-year-old
JR, she a famed film director and he a photographer known for giant paste-ups
that blur the lines between street art, graffiti, and vandalism. If Varda's
name doesn't rings bells, it's because you've seen too many "movies"
and not enough "cinema." Varda is, simply, one of the most important
filmmakers of all time, a diminutive giant of the French New Wave (1950s/60s)
that made film into an art form. One utters her name in the same breath as
icons such as Chabrol, Goddard, Rohmer, and Truffaut. She is to France what
Bergman is to Sweden, Kurosawa to Japan, Fellini to Italy, or Orson Welles to
the USA.
But now she's old, visually impaired, and museful of her
mortality. She's also whip smart, opinionated, independent, and fearless. One
sees that in her face, through her milky eyes, senses it in her bold concepts,
and her quirkiness is perched upon her head: a whimsical crown of gray fringed
by a copper dye job. By
conventional logic she should be puttering about by herself, not cavorting
about the French countryside with a fedora- hatted hipster who never removes
his dark sunglasses. Luckily, JR is also unconventional in all the right ways.
We too often think of street artists as furtive renegades who live in shadows
darker than JR's sunglasses (like Banksy), or as urban-toughened daredevils
harboring antisocial values. JR, though, has a soft side: he loves the elderly,
works with a stable team, welcomes opposing points of view, and has warm regard
for his fellow creatures.
Faces Places is
exactly as advertised—an investigation of stories etched on faces in the villages
where prosaic dramas unfold. Varda and JR hit the road in his remarkable van,
the back of which is an instant photo booth that, instead of spitting out
strips of tiny head shots, disgorges large-size grey-tone images on thin paper
from a slot on the right side of the vehicle. JR and his team then stitch
together a series of these to make enormous assemblages that they paste
circus-poster style onto the sides of buildings, factories, ruins, train
cars—even shipping crates. He and Varda pursue a simple-but-noble goal: find
ordinary people and honor them through public display. They don't waste time
with the upwardly mobile, pretentious, or haute
bourgeoisie; their subjects are farmers, postal carriers, factory workers,
waitresses, village folk, and those living on the margins.
I was hooked from the opening credits, which rolled against
a delightful backdrop of animated sketches, and began to feast from the first
project: a drive into a small town where JR distributed baguettes to the
locals, filmed individuals chomping into the bread, and then strung the images
together for what might be the world's longest baguette! I was enthralled by a
three-story poster of a postman—and what's more French than that?—complete with
shutters and doors that open through the picture.
This is the sort of film, though, in which every viewer will
be moved by different images. Two that resonated with me emotionally were of
women. In the first of these, Varda and JR landed in a played out coal mining
town where they found a block of homes scheduled for demolition. In the midst
of these, they located an older woman who was the last resident of the street.
They filmed her, enlarged her face, pasted it to the side of her home, and
slathered the rest of the block with oversized archival images of village work
scenes and long ago mine families. When she viewed it, she was so overcome that
her speechless tears shouted out, "At last! Someone who understands."
I was also moved by the only non-village trip: to the
shipping port of Le Havre, where the two talked to unionized dockworkers, most
of them men whose fathers and grandfathers worked on the docks. Varda, though a
supporter of the unions, sought out three women to photograph—with enthusiastic
support from the men, by the way. She and JR created three monumental
full-bodied portraits that were pasted onto veritable skyscrapers of stacked
cargo containers. Varda then had each woman lifted into an open container
approximately where the heart would be located in the surrounding illustration
and each spoke of what she felt. Yeah—Varda has that kind of vision.
Everything in this film delights and astonishes. Sure, some
of it is staged, but if ever a film has its heart in the right place, it's this
one. Would that more of today's directors had an ounce of Varda's vision. Would
that more of today's aging folks (ahem!) had more of JR's empathy.
Rob Weir
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