Faces Places

“I’m not a mys­tic. I’m down to earth,” says Agnès Var­da. Such is the full­ness of my heart after Faces Places that the temp­ta­tion is to hack into the trusty hyper­bole cab­i­net and fling out poly­syl­lab­ic, high-falut­ing terms for the type of film this is. How­ev­er, to tru­ly take in her work (this spe­cif­ic one and the sum of a 50-plus year career) is to recog­nise that it takes more than one per­son to make some­thing brim­ming with human good­ness. To deify Var­da is to fall into a trap that she her­self has side-stepped. Bet­ter to fol­low her exam­ple, bet­ter to run with demystification.

Cin­e­ma has always been a medi­um that wor­ships the top dog with only drops of recog­ni­tion trick­ling down to the anony­mous armies whose assists are inte­gral. Direc­tors are more often than not con­tent to bask in their per­ceived roles as super­hu­man magi­cians. Faces Places is a sub­tly self-reflex­ive doc­u­men­tary that swims against this tide, invit­ing audi­ences to see that film­mak­ing is a process of hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple, and envelop­ing each indi­vid­ual and their pri­vate cre­ativ­i­ty with­in the wider col­lab­o­ra­tive process. Art is a form of social work or, rather, it can be with the right peo­ple at the helm.

Those peo­ple are Var­da and her unlike­ly kin­dred spir­it, the French pho­tog­ra­ph­er and mural­ist JR. They make an endear­ing and strik­ing duo – an odd cou­ple forged before a word of dia­logue has even been spo­ken. At the time of film­ing, she is 88, while he is 33. Var­da is short and roundish, with her trade­mark white bowl-cut fringed with amber. A life­long lover of colour, her out­fits are bright. JR is lanky, bald and styled like a blind jazz musi­cian, all in black, com­plete with black hat and black shades. He is teased by Var­da about the per­ma-present sun­glass­es, and this low key rib­bing paves the way for as emo­tion­al­ly heavy a moment as this play­ful film has to deal. Eyes – what they see, who they see and how these visions land – are the lens­es which con­nect to the filmmaker’s soul.

Faces Places, and its French title Vis­ages Vil­lages, apt­ly bears out Varda’s ​‘down-to-earth’ mis­sion. For these two ele­ments make up the film’s core ingre­di­ent list: faces and places. A spright­ly nar­rat­ed overview deliv­ered by the two film­mak­ers explains how they were both mag­net­i­cal­ly drawn to one anoth­er. They meet, bond, play and eat choco­late éclairs. Then they hit the road in a van equipped with a giant mobile poster print­er. They search for peo­ple to pho­to­graph. Each sub­ject is then blown up and print­ed out big enough to paste onto the near­est emp­ty wall.

Every face-own­er is giv­en space to talk about the par­tic­u­lars of their life and pass com­ment on how it feels to see a giant image of them­selves, or a loved one, look­ing out across their locale. In a vil­lage in North­ern France, Jean­nine, a woman who refus­es to leave the row of min­ers’ cot­tages where her child­hood mem­o­ries live, begins to cry. A shy wait­ress in Bon­nieux, South­ern France is severe­ly weird­ed out when her image goes viral. There is no nar­ra­tive agen­da to angle what is hap­pen­ing and how it is affect­ing peo­ple. It is just hap­pen­ing and it is being documented.

These social encoun­ters are inter­spersed with con­ver­sa­tions between the two leads, who trav­el into each oth­er as they trav­el around the coun­try. The inti­ma­cies that the bond between Var­da and JR brings to the sur­face give a light­weight cre­ative social project some­thing twist­ing beneath, the breath of death on a warm summer’s day. To those famil­iar with the mighty Var­da, this access to her inner world is pre­cious. There is such ten­der­ness in both the stark exis­ten­tial­ism (she is look­ing for­ward to death because ​“that’s that”) and the gid­dy joys (mim­ing the ring­ing of a bell as she sings along to the dis­co track, ​‘Ring My Bell’). Watch­ing feels like steal­ing up on a rare beast relax­ing in their nat­ur­al habitat.

Of course, the film is not so guile­less as this. It is care­ful­ly script­ed to trans­port one high into the land of oth­ers and below into an indi­vid­ual spir­it. Varda’s strength as a doc­u­men­tar­i­an is her con­nec­tive think­ing, pre­vi­ous­ly most pow­er­ful­ly expressed in The Glean­ers and I, in which she dig­ni­fies social out­casts by draw­ing par­al­lels between their lives and the sub­jects of old paint­ings. In Faces Places, she turns this side­wise under­stand­ing onto her own life, coaxed by JR. The Beach­es of Agnès from 2008 is nom­i­nal­ly Varda’s big auto­bi­og­ra­phy, but this more stream­lined work dis­tills in a dis­arm­ing­ly breezy fash­ion the DNA of who she is as a human, as an artist, and as a humane artist.