Charming French film easy to love
Faces Places (E, 89 mins) Directed by Agne` s Varda and JR. ★★★★1⁄2
An 88-year-old woman and a 33-year-old man take a road trip through some stunning northern French landscapes in a van.
At every stop, they take photographs of willing locals and then turn those photos into startlingly large printed installations, plastered on to the side of buildings, railway carriages and – gorgeously – a stack of shipping containers. Nope, it’s not the latest Gallic whimsy dreamed up just in time for a tilt at a Best Foreign Language Oscar. It’s a true story. And it’s a little beauty.
Visages Villages – released in New Zealand with the slightly redundant and less poetic title Faces Places – is rhapsodic and gently subversive. It comments quietly on many aspects of modern life via a number of unfailingly thoughtful and considered interview/photo subjects.
Co-directors and stars Agnes Varda and JR are extraordinarily assured film-makers and artists. Varda was a founding member of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) and Left Bank (Rive Gauche) movements, a collaborator with Jean Luc Godard – who she tries to visit in the film – and most of the other auteurs and actors who changed cinema forever in the mid 1950s.
Her 2001 documentary The Gleaners and I might be her bestknown work outside her native country today.
JR is the pseudonym of an unnamed artist who has been changing urban landscapes since he was a teenage graffiti artist. JR’s preferred medium is massive – building-sized – paste-ups of pixelated portraits of local inhabitants.
His work was featured in the opening ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic games. In collaboration, the pair are a dream. Clearly besotted with each other’s energy, process and humour, they travel together like a grandmother and her favourite grandchild, laughing, talking and seeing possibilities for new work in every place they visit.
Faces Places had me by the heart from its opening stanza – a visit to a near deserted Northern mining village. By the time the pair were recreating the sprint through the Louvre from Godard’s Bande a Part an hour later, I was quietly in love with this film. If you care at all about art and the ways in which it can comment on society, I’m pretty sure you’ll be as charmed as I was.
– Graeme Tuckett