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Faces Places
****
Dir: Agnes Varda and JR
Starring: Agnes Varda and JR
(France, 12A, 1hr 29mins)
Sometimes one wonders if all cinema would be improved if it were just one long Agnes Varda film.
In Faces Places, at the ripe old age of 88 (she’s 90 now), Varda teams up, for the first time in her directorial career with another director; JR, the famed French street artist. The premise is simple: the two resolve to make a film in which they travel around the villages of France, meeting people, taking photos of them, and then producing large-scale pieces of public art, pasting these people up on walls, cliffs and shipping containers, a faint echo of Varda’s wonderful 1981 documentary Mur Murs, about the Los Angeles street art scene. Alongside that is a dissection of the duo’s relationship with each other, which is comical and heartwarming – JR with his dark sunglasses and hat, which he never takes off, and Agnes with her trademark two-tone bowl-cut.
What emerges at the end of the film is a deeply humanist, caring vision of both artistic creation, its relationship to human beings and to the people that Varda and JR photograph. For the most part, they photograph people in forgotten areas of France; the single old lady left alone on a street in a formerly bustling mining town; the dock-workers’ wives, standing by their men amidst strikes and weakening worker’s rights; goat-herders who live as much as they can off the land, lamenting the industrialisation of agriculture. In a French film industry that can be overly jigged towards Parisienne stories, historical dramas, or grim social realism, this is a wonderfully positive celebration of the way people have led their lives amidst an ever-changing France.
Varda and JR film these people with empathy and understanding, making every attempt (no matter how brief their time on camera is) to present them as they are. In a France that is still full of rising tensions – let’s not forget that the fascistic Marine Le Pen got to the second round of presidential elections only the other year in France – the law of averages suggests a small number of the figures interviewed in the film may well have voted for Le Pen’s Front Nationale.
Varda has always been a deeply political filmmaker, right back to her debut Le Point Courte (1955) and her New Wave masterpiece Cleo From Back to 7 (1962). Yet, without so much as openly mentioning politics, she subtly strikes at the heart of the underlying tensions behind the rise of figures like Le Pen across Europe. Whilst celebrating each figure she comes across for who they are and their life experience, we slowly begin to realise, across the course of the film, that many of these people are amongst the left-behind, the forgotten, those whom the decades of neoliberal economic policy in France has ignored.
It’s there in the mining town: as the mines closed down and the miners left, the street on which Varda and JR arrive is slated for demolition, empty but for the sole lady, Jeanine. A whole world of physical memory and geography has been left to the ether, recollected only in the memories of the miners whom we see speaking, telling of how life used to be lived in this area for better or for worse. Varda and JR leave behind a huge image of the old lady’s face, pasted across her house, a recognisation that this person was here. When we visit the dockworkers’ wives, one states that she “stands behind” her husband – Varda corrects her, doesn’t she mean “stands beside”? The lady agrees, almost as if surprised that she can consider herself equal. For Varda and JR, people are there to be celebrated and listened to, and they’ve set out to make a film is exactly that, joyous and youthful, whilst being aware of Varda’s increasing age; limited mobility and poor eyesight are frequent motifs frequently slow her down against the bounding, tall and gangly JR, thought the two are superb collaborators.
One sole caveat comes at the final hurdle, when Varda take JR to Switzerland to meet her old friend and peer Jean-Luc Godard. The two are the last two significant figures still alive from the French New Wave. Godard doesn’t show up, leaving a cryptic message. In response, Varda calls him a “dirty rat”. It’s the one deeply upsetting moment in the film. Varda speaks of Godard’s achievements as a filmmaker and his coldness as a human being. Yet, looking back at the achievements of the French New Wave 50-60 years on, it is not Godard’s empty exercises and philosphical statements that remain fresh, but Varda’s deep humanism, playfulness, and searching curiosity about the world around her.
words Fedor Tot