Vis­ages Vil­lages – first look review

She is an 88-year-old film direct­ing icon with a two-tone pur­ple rinse. He is a 33-year-old pho­tog­ra­ph­er and con­cep­tu­al artist who likes to wear a sil­ly lit­tle tril­by hat. Togeth­er, the amble around the French coun­try­side and vis­it small towns and allow their imag­i­na­tion to run amok. Then they explain the moti­va­tions of their strik­ing pub­lic instal­la­tions to local peo­ple to see how they react.

That is, in a salt­ed nut­shell, the extreme­ly charm­ing and orig­i­nal new film from Agnès Var­da, who is joined by the per­ma-shad­ed and like-mind­ed scamp, JR, on her whim­si­cal jour­ney to who-knows-where. They ride across the land­scape not to force their art into people’s faces, but to human­ise dead spaces and bring rich­ness and vital­i­ty where there is none. What they do is breathe life into build­ings and struc­tures towards which your eyes would nev­er need to nat­u­ral­ly glance.

They find a wall and they paste up a giant pho­to­graph, often argu­ing about the inten­tions and the result. Their art is inclu­sive, as it con­nects local peo­ple to the spaces they inhab­it, hope­ful­ly even chang­ing lives. These hap­pen­ings are care­ful­ly staged and craft­ed, much like the dia­logue between Var­da and JR. The sub­jects they rope in also occa­sion­al­ly speak script­ed lines, like the pair are trans­form­ing rur­al France into one gigan­tic com­mu­ni­ty the­atre project.

Var­da meets a woman, the wife of a min­er who now lives alone in a shab­by red brick house that’s been ear­marked for demo­li­tion. They paste an image of her on the exte­ri­or as a sym­bol of her sto­ic defi­ance. Var­da then hugs her and whis­pers, ​“we’re friends now”. The chat­ting and bick­er­ing throw up the odd pro­found obser­va­tion or daffy aside, but there’s no sense the film is being made to fit into a pre-exist­ing thesis.

It’s a jour­ney to cel­e­brate peo­ple and places, and to just look at life beyond the city. The cou­ple idolise the work­ers and arti­sans, but also cel­e­brate the women behind the men. And at the point that you think this film has set­tled on its agree­ably cosy lau­rels, one final big trick is revealed. So annoyed is Var­da with the fact that JR won’t remove his sun­glass­es, she whisks him down to Rolle in Switzer­land and meet an old acquain­tance who also had a thing for cov­er­ing his eyes: Jean-Luc Godard.

In that astound­ing final sequence Var­da takes seri­ous stock of her life, express­ing sad­ness that her phys­i­cal ail­ments have pre­vent­ed her from main­tain­ing a valu­able dia­logue with the peo­ple she loves. Godard, the mer­ry prankster, rounds things off on a note of bit­ter­sweet resent­ment, but the film’s spir­it of cre­ation and con­nec­tion is strong enough to shine through the shade.