Faces Places
Cohen Media Group (2017), 89 minutes
Like many films about an unlikely on-screen duo, Faces Places begins with a Meet Cute. The couple in this case is not a romantic couple but an artistic one: Agnès Varda, the 89-year-old stalwart of the French New Wave, and her co-director JR, a 34-year-old street artist commonly known as the “French Banksy.” Seen side by side, the two present a comical, almost cartoonish, study in contrasts: Varda, a plump and matronly figure with her trademark red-and-white bowl cut, and JR, the lanky hipster sporting a signature fedora and sunglasses. As if to highlight the incongruity, the film begins by telling us how they did not meet: not on a road (cut to the two artists passing each other by on a country lane); not on the dance floor (cut to the sprightly Varda busting moves at a nightclub); not at a bus stop or a bakery. Rather, JR tells us, he sought out Varda to share his appreciation for her life’s work—and to explore a collaboration.
The film that follows is at once the result of and the depiction of that collaborative process. It sends Varda and JR on a road trip across France, in a photo-booth truck that can spit out massive prints of its subjects like oversized Polaroids. Stopping at various villages throughout the French countryside, the filmmakers create photographic portraits of the ordinary French citizens they encounter, and then blow up the photos to create large-format street murals and public art in the places where they live.
For fans of Varda, the mode is a familiar one: like her celebrated documentaries The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès, the new film features Varda prominently as both artist and subject, musing on her personal life and artistic legacy at the twilight of her career. And like those films, too, Faces Places is much more playful and less esoteric than it might sound. For all her high-art credentials and penchant for experimentation, Varda has never been a ponderous filmmaker, and her later films in particular are marked by a disarming and deceptively breezy tone.
Faces Places is no exception. Part buddy comedy, part road trip movie, and part art documentary, Varda’s latest (and likely last) film moves along briskly and goes down easily, full of visual charms, amusing sight gags and likable personalities. Yet its surface pleasures also point to more profound depths. Coming from a New Wave filmmaker approaching 90 years of age, Faces Places plays like a capstone to Varda’s career, a testament to her artistic spirit, and a symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation.
Agnès Varda has long occupied a complex position in the French New Wave, the iconoclastic film movement that propelled a new generation of auteurs to the forefront of French cinema beginning in the late 1950s. Though sometimes called the Godmother of the New Wave, Varda was also in important respects an outlier. First, there is the obvious fact of her gender: in a movement and profession largely dominated by men, Varda was the rare woman to find both critical acclaim and lasting success, and her films often feature feminist subjects and themes.
Nor did Varda arrive at her career through the usual route. A photographer by training, she never wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, the polemical film journal whose pages launched the careers of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, who were all film critics before they picked up a camera. Varda had a broader interest in the art world than many of her movie-mad counterparts, associating with the “Left Bank” group of filmmakers who also ran in Parisian literary circles. Yet even as she stood somewhat outside of the New Wave, Varda was also ahead of it. Her first feature film, 1955’s La Pointe Courte, predated Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless by a full four years, while pointing the way to a new mode of shoestring-budget filmmaking that those directors would later embrace.
One need not know any of this history to appreciate Faces Places, but Varda’s artistic legacy is very much a subject of the new film. Early on, we see clips from her earlier work as JR recalls the indelible images of films like Cleo from 5 to 7 (Varda’s existentialist 1962 drama about a singer awaiting a cancer diagnosis) and Mur Murs (her 1978 documentary about street murals in Los Angeles). Varda, for her part, seems to see JR as a kindred spirit, praising his 2014 installation at the Pantheon and even comparing him to the young Jean-Luc Godard, with whom he shares a passing resemblance. It is a typically generous judgment on Varda’s part, speaking to her openness to finding new artistic collaborators like her former contemporaries in the New Wave.
Indeed, for a member of a film movement that famously celebrated the director as singular auteur, Varda here places a premium on collaboration, and not just with her official co-director. Faces Places is in many ways a work of collective art, with its subjects participating in the artistic process at every turn. It even begins with a lengthy, animated title scroll celebrating the film’s crowd-sourced funders: a kind of democratic gesture, placing the audience on an equal collaborative level as the artists.
When the film proper gets underway, this collaborative impulse becomes ever more clear. Wherever they stop, Varda and JR treat their subjects as equal partners, depicting them according to the concerns and circumstances of their own daily lives. In one early segment, the filmmakers visit Bruay-la-Buissière, a run-down coal town in the north of France, where they meet Jeanine, an elderly coal miner’s daughter who is the only soul still living in old workers’ housing that has been slated for destruction. As Varda interviews Jeanine and the town’s other residents—who share nostalgic anecdotes of its bygone industrial heyday, and melancholy memories of the scars their fathers brought home from work each day—JR prepares a larger-than-life tribute to Jeanine, imprinting a mural of her face on the outside of her home. It is a touching gesture, bringing grateful tears to the eyes of the woman whom Varda dubs “la Résistante” for her stubborn devotion to her hometown.
Like so much of the film, though, the scene also conveys a sense of loss and impermanence. Varda and JR’s artistic project—to create tangible, tactile representations of their subjects in the places they inhabit—is not just a crowd-pleasing or feel-good exercise. It is also an attempt to pay tribute to lives and lifestyles that are rapidly receding into the past. Faces Places is thus a work of ethnography as much as iconography—a cinematic travelogue that seeks to preserve, however fleetingly, the remembrance of things past.
Not all of the film’s subjects are elderly, nor do they all express nostalgia for some bygone era. But the film’s choice of locations speaks to Varda’s appreciation of small-town French life, while hinting at the dislocations that globalization has brought to such communities. After the trip to coal country, the filmmakers take us to Chérence, a tiny country town where one farmer with a computerized tractor does work that once employed dozens. “I consider myself a passenger in the tractor,” he says as he climbs into the machine, presses a few buttons on a touch screen and watches it roam up and down his vast agricultural holdings. Marx might have had something to say about the alienation of this particular worker; Varda, for her part, muses in voiceover about the loneliness of his job.
The film has too light a touch to dwell ponderously on these sociopolitical insights; it is emphatically not some kind of ideological tract about left-behind workers in a globalized economy. (The aforementioned farmer, for his part, seems happy enough that technology makes his job easier.) But the film’s many faces and places do provide occasion to ponder the changing world of work in present-day France. In one small village, Varda interviews a mailman who fondly recalls the days when he made his rounds by bicycle rather than truck, stopping to socialize with neighbors along the way. In the southeastern town of Chateau-Arnoux-Saint-Auban, a grizzled factory worker happily tells the camera of his impending retirement after a long company career. In the northern port of Le Havre, Varda speaks with three dockworkers who proudly profess their membership in France’s leftist CGT union, long the scourge of aspiring labor market reformers. And the early segment in France’s northern rust belt earns much of its poignancy from Jeanine’s defiant devotion to a livelihood that is no longer sustainable. (It is little wonder that the province where she lives, Pas-de-Calais, is one of the two that went decisively for Marine Le Pen in the second round of this year’s presidential election.)
Underlying all these encounters is Varda’s abiding interest in France’s working classes and a certain nostalgia for the postwar economic model that sustained their way of life. The art that she and JR create pays tribute to these workers, emphasizing the individuality of each subject with idiosyncratic representations at their otherwise anonymous workplaces. The farmer gets a gigantic mural of himself on the face of his barn, looming over his fields like a Colossus. The day-shift and night-shift workers of a chemical plant are depicted on the factory walls, each group reaching out to the other in a gesture of solidarity. At the port of Le Havre, Varda and JR pay tribute to the dockworkers’ wives, imprinting their portraits on a tall stack of shipping containers.
These murals are undoubtedly impressive spectacles, and the filmmakers make full use of their widescreen canvas to convey their immensity. Whether they constitute serious art in their own right is another question, one that this good-natured film is not eager to ask. To the jaded viewer, Faces Places may at times verge on the cutesy, relying heavily on its likable personalities and the novelty of seeing a grande dame of world cinema snapping selfies and trading jokes with a hipster street artist. Those hoping for a critical examination of the world of graffiti and street art should look elsewhere; they could do worse than Banksy’s 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop, which offers a self-aware look at how ostensibly “transgressive” art can so easily be copied and commodified.
However one feels about the merits of JR’s art, though, Varda’s presence give this material a certain gravitas that it would otherwise lack. Varda’s mortality casts a shadow over the film’s surface cheeriness, rendering the project a swan song for a filmmaker bidding farewell to the faces and places that have shaped her own career. Along their journey, Varda and JR stop at the grave of Henri-Cartier Bresson, where Varda reminisces about the great photographer’s influence on her early career. She also revisits pictures she had taken in the 1950s of Guy Bourdin, another French master and former Varda collaborator. In one moving passage, Varda selects an old black-and-white photograph of Bourdin for JR to plaster on an old stone bunker on a Normandy beach. Returning the next day, she discovers that the waves have already washed the image off the stone—an accidental reminder from nature of the transience of art.
Perhaps the film’s most touching gesture comes near the end. Throughout Faces Places, Varda repeatedly references her failing vision, and at one point we see her receive eye surgery. As the film nears its conclusion, JR sits Varda down in his studio for a close-up photo shoot focusing on her eyes, before turning to her feet. The purpose becomes clear soon enough when we see that JR has blown up those images to imprint them on a cargo train — her eyes staring out from the surface of one cargo car, her toes wrapped around another. One of the onlookers at the station is bemused by the whole thing (“Why put toes on trains?”), but the sight provides one of the film’s loveliest images. “This train will go places you’ve never been,” JR tells Varda, as we watch her old, tired eyes and wrinkled feet recede into the distance, heading off to destination unknown.
There is one more train journey to be made before the film is over: to Rolle, Switzerland, where Varda and JR have arranged a rendezvous with Jean-Luc Godard. At 86 years old, Godard is, along with Varda, one of the last living filmmakers who made his name during the French New Wave. And if Varda is that movement’s lovable grandmother, Godard is its aloof elder statesman: a brilliant and innovative artist, but also a famously prickly and mercurial presence, a semi-recluse who eschews publicity even while continuing to release films well into his 80s.
As Varda chats with JR on the train en route to see Godard, she speaks of him like a long-lost friend, fondly recalling their work together while regretting that they have fallen out of touch. She also admits of both his virtues and eccentricities: “He is unpredictable…he is a solitary philosopher,” she tells JR, as if pre-emptively apologizing in the case that Godard does not show up. It is clear that Varda has a great deal emotionally invested in this encounter, perhaps the last chance to see an old friend and to introduce him to a new one. The film itself is rife with references to Godard. Varda compares the 1960s-era Godard to JR today, she shows the younger artist a clip of one of her earliest short films featuring Godard, and she re-creates a famous scene from his Band of Outsiders, in which a trio of youngsters make a mad dash through the halls of the Louvre. (In Varda’s tribute, it is JR pushing the sprightly Varda on a wheelchair through the museum.)
For all Varda’s obvious admiration for Godard and her eagerness to re-connect, alas, he does not show up. When Varda and JR arrive at his house, they find the doors locked and no one at home, with a cryptic note scrawled on the glass, referencing days of old when Godard used to dine with Varda and her late husband, the filmmaker Jacques Demy. Varda is visibly stung by the gesture, seeing Godard’s no-show as an insulting rebuke and his note as a deliberate attempt to inflict emotional pain. There is a real sadness to this ending, a sense that Godard is mocking Varda and denying her entry to his esteemed company. Varda trudges off, tears in her eyes, cursing Godard like an estranged sibling (“I still like you, you dirty rat.”)
Yet there is another way to read this ending: not so much the thoughtless gesture of an old crank as the deliberate, coded message of a withdrawn artist who prefers to communicate through cinema. JR seizes on this interpretation in the final scene, asking Varda: “Was he challenging the narrative structure of your film?” It may seem a stretch, but for the fact that Godard frequently converses with fellow filmmakers in just this sort of way. At its peak, the New Wave was a movement of directors commenting on and critiquing each other’s work in their own films; the Godard biographer Richard Brody, for instance, has written of the “tacit dialogue” that Godard kept up with his colleague François Truffaut in film after the former friends were no longer on speaking terms. The press-shy Godard likewise released a short, cryptic video tribute to the late Eric Rohmer when he died in 2010, belying Godard’s supposed estrangement from his New Wave contemporaries. Seen in that light, Godard’s conspicuous absence from the end of Faces Places may count not so much as as a slight against Varda as a pained confessional statement about his own inability to participate in her nostalgic project.
Whatever his intention, Godard’s snub does cast the film’s final moments in a melancholy light. He seems to deliberately reject Varda’s fondness for their past together, leaving her to commiserate with JR as they look out from the shores of Lake Geneva. Ironically, though, if Godard meant by his absence to challenge Varda’s film, he does so in a way that simultaneously reinforces its message and spirit. Yearning for her past but unable to return to it, Varda has no choice but to look forward alongside a new collaborator, in search of new faces and places to see.
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