Review of the film "Faces Places"

Agnes Varda, the grande dame of French cinema, may have completed her last movie. Varda stated that her most recent film, Faces Places, which she co-created with avant-garde French artist JR, would be an appropriate capstone piece in an interview with writer Eric Kohn for Indiewire.com. Varda compared herself to a fighter who may be remaining for one too many fights in the interview at the age of 89. The curtain may have closed on Agnes Varda at the Cinema, despite the fact that she is not, as she puts it, "going to bed," since she still has art projects to complete.

If so, Faces Places is not just fitting but also a perfect summary of her filmmaking attitude and her lifetime commitment to the faces of the French lower middle class. In Faces Places, Varda collaborates with JR, a French artist known for his massive installations in out-of-the-ordinary locations. JR drives a vehicle that resembles a massive camera as he traverses France. It is a camera, after all. Ordinary folks load up and get their pictures shot, and the pictures pop out in a big way from the side of the truck like Polaroid pictures.

Despite their ages being so far apart, JR and Agnes have the same sensibility. Faces Places depicts their warmth and apparent fondness for one another even though they joined the project as close strangers, despite the fact that they may be combative with one another at times about their common goal. Varda appears to be passing on some of her heritage to the young artist who is entering the cinema for the first time with Faces Places, however the movie makes no indication of whether he plans to remain in the film industry.

Throughout Faces Places, this amazing duo of artists roams the French countryside in search of distinctive individuals and settings to mount large-scale photographs that are adhered to the sides of any building that would let them. JR and Varda stumble across a rusted, decrepit mining town that is getting ready to demolish the last of a group of row houses that formerly housed hundreds of coal workers and their families, and what follows is one of my favorite scenes in any movie in 2017 so far.

Agnes is familiar with the area since she had got a box of postcards with unusual candid images of the coal miners in this very French town when she was a young girl. They come to a woman who is the last survivor of the residents of row houses here. She has steadfastly refused to leave the house she has called home for as long as she can recall. Agnes and JR come up with the idea to honor this wonderful woman by wrapping her small stone cottage with a picture of her as they begin to memorialize the coal miners by pinning huge, cut-out photos that have been magnified and blown up on the sides of the now-empty row houses from Agnes' postcard collection. Her beautiful tears when she sees herself all over the exterior of her house are a fantastic summary of Agnes Varda's work.

These distinctive installations are all visual wonders. JR uses a painter's touch while carefully enlarging the photographs to a spectacular scale before pasting them on the sides of buildings, the walls of industrial parks, dwellings, and a group of amusing fish on the side of a water tower. It's amazing to look at, and it made me want to travel to France and hunt for these tiny communities to see if these amazing creations have continued since production wrapped up late last year.

As Agnes Varda arranges a trip to Switzerland for a surprise reunion with her old friend and fellow French New Wave member, Jean Luc Godard, the movie's last act is an intensely emotional voyage into Varda's past. Agnes is excited and uneasy as she travels with JR; she hasn't seen Godard in a long time and doesn't know what to anticipate from the buddy who has become a recluse. I'll let you find out what happens, but given that IMDB only identifies Godard as appearing in archive material, you can probably picture what happens.

Faces Places is not at all depressing, despite Varda's suggestion that it could be her final movie and my mention of the encounter with Godard at the conclusion of the movie. Faces Places is a delightful visual feast. The film never lingers; it takes pleasure from each stop Agnes and JR make along the road and moves on before we become used to the visuals and stories of individuals you may actually want to spend hours with if you had the opportunity. Varda and JR developed and shot some stunning images.

One of the best movies of 2017 is Faces Places.