SHORT TAKE

FACES PLACES directed by Agnès Varda and JR

Apleasurable, if irrelevant, distraction for the New Zealand viewer of this charming French documentary (originally Visages Villages) is the striking similarity of its two creators to film-maker Florian Habicht and the late Marti Friedlander.

Might those two, one wonders, have come up with something as engaging as that concocted by this pair, the woman widely regarded as the mother of the French New Wave and a man who has been dubbed the Cartier-Bresson of the 21st century.

By a pleasing symmetry, she was 88 and he 33 during the making of the film and they fit together hand-inglove as they travel the backblocks of France turning large-scale, black-andwhite photographs of ordinary, mainly working-class people into giant murals.

The partnership, which JR describes as “making the same images differently”, builds on his Inside Out Project, which turned a van into a photo booth on wheels, disgorging A0-size laser prints for paste-up on walls and other structures. Globally, Inside Out has had a strong political edge, but here, filtered through Varda’s warm-hearted and people-centred aesthetic sensibility, it becomes public art of the most arresting and liberating kind. It’s as if Banksy met Christo and they decided to make art that belonged to its subjects. IN CINEMAS NOW. Peter Calder