Faces Places [Visages villages] **** (2017, Agnès Varda, JR) – Movie Review

French New Wave film director Agnes Varda and young idealist photographer/ mural artist JR journey in a van through rural France, taking pictures and creating art, while forming a devoted unlikely if friendship. The van is equipped as a portable photo booth with a printing facility, so they can create colossal mural pictures of faces and places they wish to celebrate.

They meet and celebrate bunches of rightly admiring people along the way as they create their art and reflect on lives and times. And they end up at the house of that other famous French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard, with hilarious results.

Nominated for a 2018 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, Agnès Varda and JR’s 2017 documentary feature Faces Places [Visages villages] charms, delights and beguiles. It is very artful, entertaining, amusing and touching. Varda and JR are a brilliant odd couple, bickering away like an old married couple. JR infuriates the seeing-impaired Varda by his refusal to take off his sunglasses, but, when he finally does, she says: ‘I don’t see you very well, but I see you.’

With her nomination at the age of 89, Agnès Varda is the oldest person nominated for a competitive Oscar.

Faces Places was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 19 May 2017, screened at the London Film Festival on 12 October 2017 and finally released in the UK on 21 September 2018. It won the Documentary of the Year prize at the 2019 London Film Critics’ Circle awards, beating strong competition such as Free Solo and Whitney.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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