Faces Places (2017)
Directed by Agnes Varda, JR
Written by Agnes Varda
Starring Agnes Varda, JR
Release Date June 28th 2017
The grand lady of the French Cinema, Agnes Varda, may have made her final film. In interview with Indiewire.com, Varda told writer Eric Kohn that her new film, Faces Places, made with innovative French artist JR, would be a fitting final film. In the interview, Varda compares herself at 89 years old to a boxer potentially staying for one fight too many. She’s not "going to bed," as she puts it, she still has art installations to work on, but indeed the curtain may have come down on Agnes Varda at the Cinema.
If that is the case, Faces Places isn’t merely appropriate, it rings beautifully true as a summation of her filmic spirit and her lifelong dedication to the visages of the French lower middle class. Faces Places finds Varda working with JR, a French artist who has made his name with large scale installations in unusual places. JR travels France in a truck that looks like a giant camera. Indeed, it is a camera, inside, average people load in and get their picture taken and the photo emerges in large scale from the side of the truck like a Polaroid.
JR and Agnes’ sensibilities are the same as their ages are so very different. While they are feisty towards each other at times over their shared vision, Faces Places captures their warmth and obvious care for each other even as they entered the project as near strangers. Varda in many ways seems to be bestowing some of her legacy upon the young artist who is making the move into the cinema for the very first time with Faces Places, though whether he intends to stay in the film world is not mentioned in the film.
Throughout Faces Places this wonderful pair of artists roam the French countryside looking for unique faces and places to install large scale photography that is pasted to the sides of any structure people will allow them. In one of my favorite moments in any film in 2017, JR and Varda happen upon a rusty, rundown coal town that is preparing to tear down the last of a set of row-houses that once housed hundreds of coal miners and their families.
Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal
