Faces Places

Can a doc be defined as adorable? There seems no better appellation for Faces Places ( French title: Visages, Villages), a breezy travelogue starring and directed by French film legend Agnès Varda and the large-scale photographer known as JR.

The two unlikely friends — Varda is 88, JR 33 — ramble around France in a cube van decorated to look like a giant camera, taking huge pictures of ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary places. Thus images of miners decorate the soon- to- be- demolished row houses where they once lived. Villagers appear to share the world’s longest baguette. And the wives of dockworkers loom like giants on the sides of shipping containers.

Varda explains the purpose of their art in simple terms: “To meet new faces and photograph them so they don’t fall down the holes in my memory.”

But we sense there are few holes in her sharp mind; visiting Normandy, where she once photographed the late Guy Bourdin, she remembers the very spot where she set up her camera. Then she and JR paste a blowup of that photo on a ruined bunker that pokes out of the beach.

Gradually, Faces Places swivels from a documentation of an art project into a gentle meditation on the transitory nature of art, and indeed of life. It feels like an unplanned shift, but Varda is too clever for that. “Chance has always been my best assistant,” she remarks at one point. That may be, but only when you are open to its whims does chance lend a hand. In this lovely film it functions as the third star, and an invisible co-producer.