Movie Review – Faces Places

Faces Places (2017)
Written by Agnes Varda
Directed by Agnes Varda & JR

French director Agnes Varda has never hidden her love of the French village. Her filmmaking career began with photographing the people who lived & worked in a working-class seaside town. Her first short film starred a couple who lived in such a place. While Varda’s narrative film work has varied in its subjects and interest, her documentary work has remained fixed on the working & the poor, people who do not get spotlighted much in media or society. That trend continues in her collaboration with street artist & photographer JR. They create giant portraits of people they meet, plastering them onto the facades of buildings and allowing so many “invisible” people to be seen. Along the way, the friendship between Varda and JR blossoms.

A Varda documentary often has a very free association feel to it. She’ll be reminded of something in passing; that memory will inspire her to explore it further and can sometimes shift the whole focus of the film. Other times, they are just brief but illuminating asides. JR’s specialty van is a mobile photo booth with a large-format printer, allowing him to make the portraits ready to plaster within an hour or less. This allows us to see the subject’s reactions in real-time, which is one of the most rewarding elements of the picture; people who see themselves as so small in the scale of the world & life are overcome with emotion when given a place of prominence. 

One of the most memorable encounters in the film is early on. Varda & JR meet Jeanine, the lone holdout in a row of miners’ homes set to be demolished. They sit down and ask her about what it was like before the mining industry was diminished here, and Jeanine describes a vibrant, tightly socially knit community. In her heart, she knows if she leaves, then all that will truly be gone, replaced by whatever the corporate entities want. The lives of the people she loved are like onion paper to them. The massive portrait of this woman JR & Varda present to the town causes Jeanine to become overwhelmed with emotion. She is humble, quiet, and has never seen herself as worthy of recognition in her community. The gift these two filmmakers give her corrects her thinking; she is carrying the memories & honor of hardworking people who will not be remembered in such a way.

The documentary becomes a mix of reflection by Varda, looking back on her body of work in a way similar to The Beaches of Agnes. However, counterpointing that with the people she meets on this journey helps to reframe those memories. Varda connects ideas she’s explored in her films and what she sees in these people in the present. Even JR triggers a memory of Jean-Luc Godard and his ever-present sunglasses. That causes her to want to introduce the young artist to the French New Wave icon and one of the film’s most emotional moments. Godard is made aware of her visit and refuses to answer the door when they arrive, leaving a rather cruel note referencing Varda’s late husband, Jacques Demy. 

Their friendship goes back to 1958, but it’s evident from their respective bodies of work that Varda & Godard are very different filmmakers. She makes movies that feel intensely humanist, open to feminine experience in particular, warm & reverent of people. Godard’s films are often dissonant, outsiders in conflict with their world, often coming to cynical conclusions about the world. Varda’s reaction to Godard’s insult is very human; it hurts her, yet she is unwilling to divorce herself from this friendship. She relates that Godard has always been intensely solitary and can be abrasive when what he’s actually communicating is a fear of being vulnerable. It is worth noting Varda sought to make a connection (JR to Godard) while her absent friend could only think of himself. 

A great example of the stream-of-consciousness structure in the film comes when Varda & JR spend time with a farmer who laments that the new, efficient technology has led to farmers becoming antisocial. In the past, you needed collaboration, which led to conversations between agrarians. A mailman recalls how he used to stop and chat with the farmers while he made his stops. An encounter with a goat farmer who burns the horns off his flock to keep them from fighting troubles Varda tremendously. Another goat farmer they interview expresses how disgusting they find the removal of horns. JR & Varda make a mural of a horned goat to honor the animals.

It doesn’t stop there because the goats remind Varda of a photo she made early in her career of a dead goat she came upon. That jumps to a long sequence of memories about a model she worked with as a photographer in her early days. Guy Bordin was also a photographer, and they learned much about the art from each other. Varda & JR print one of her photos of Bordin to paste up as a mural. But where? Bordin, like so many of Varda’s friends at this point, had passed away. They place his mural on an old German coastal bunker that has tumbled over the cliffside of a Northern French town. They work with expediency because, with high tide, the mural will be dissolved. It reflects the transitory nature of life, especially when Varda is nearing 90 at this point. The people she knew for so long are being washed away; her memory of them is all that remains. This brings us back to Jeanine living in the block of empty miners’ houses.

I wouldn’t say Faces Places is my favorite Varda film. There is a lot of overlap between this and Beaches, and there will be more overlap with our final film and Varda’s last picture, which is next to review. Being in Varda’s presence is always a treat. She was a true artist, unafraid of expressing herself and entirely open to the people she met, of learning something about being alive from them. In this film, she honors those people who rarely get appreciation.