Old Yorker

  • Faces Places

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Visages Villages

    Agnès Varda and JR (2017)

    Agnès Varda is on screen for so much of this documentary, and is such a strong presence, that you almost forget while you’re watching Faces Places she’s behind the camera too.  Only on reflection do you start to appreciate the achievement of someone of Varda’s age – she celebrated her ninetieth birthday in May this year – putting this film together.  Her co-star and co-director, fifty-five years her junior, is JR, the self-styled ‘photograffeur‘ who has made his name fly-posting large monochrome photographic images in public places around the world, appropriating these in the manner of a graffiti artist.  Varda’s failing eyesight and the hugely magnifying form of JR’s work make for an apt pairing even before we experience the connection and increasing affection between them as they journey together through France, interviewing and photographing various communities and individuals.  They then enlarge the portraits taken for display, usually on buildings, where the people concerned live or work.  The film’s English title, although it sounds a little vague beside Visages Villages, is arguably more accurate in the sense that Varda’s and JR’s focus isn’t exclusively rural.

    The artful direction of Faces Places makes the pair’s travels seem continuously impromptu, even though more than one port of call turns out to be a return visit, for Varda at least.  The narrative progresses easily and as if spontaneously yet it’s satisfyingly shaped.  An affecting postscript illustrates this particularly well.  Though he may not be a mystery man to the same extent as Banksy, JR’s real name isn’t known and he always wears a hat and dark glasses.  The latter concealment frustrates Varda, who keeps urging JR to stop hiding.  She even shows him a bit of black-and-white footage she shot in the 1960s, in which Jean-Luc Godard, in an uncharacteristically light-hearted moment, is fooling about in costume and make-up but without his spectacles.  (In fact, Godard’s eyes were rarely as invisible behind his lenses as JR’s are.)  In the closing stages of their singular road movie, Varda and JR switch to a different form of transport.  As a surprise for JR (according to Varda), they take a train to visit Godard at his home in the Swiss town of Rolle.  They arrive at the appointed time but he’s not in – or not answering anyway.  To make matters worse, he has left Varda a cryptic note on the door, referring to a meeting many years ago with her and Jacques Demy.   She’s very distressed – not just by Godard’s ‘bad hospitality’ but by thoughts of her late husband too.  JR tries to cheer her up and briefly removes his shades.  The camera shows the somewhat blurred image that Varda actually sees but she’s grateful to JR for what he’s done.  This remarkable moment is the culmination of the film’s blend of happenstance and planning.   It has seemed inevitable for some time that JR will eventually expose his eyes to Varda.  Yet the circumstances in which this happens are convincingly accidental.

    I was apprehensive about Faces Places.  I’d seen the trailer what felt like many times and it got on my nerves:  the droll music; the madcap homage to Godard’s Bande à part, as JR pushes Varda through the Louvre in a wheelchair; the bits of blurb – ‘Agnès Varda and JR are a screen duo for the ages’, and so on.  Even Varda’s two-tone hair (white on top, dyed below – a kind of cappuccino effect) was starting to irritate.  It’s a great relief that nearly all the archness in the film seems to have been concentrated into the trailer.  Perhaps he publicity people know what they’re doing and this is what attracts plenty of people but the trailer is a travesty of the complete work (and Matthieu Chedid’s score is actually charming in small doses).  This begins with visual illustrations plus voiceover explanations of the ways in which the co-directors didn’t first meet.  Once they’ve got this joke out of their system and turn to the people they did meet, Faces Places is thoroughly absorbing.  The residents of a former mining village, a grizzled free spirit proud to show off his improvised home,  two goat farmers with contrasting approaches to animal welfare, a trio of dock workers and their wives – these are just a few of the large and various cast of characters.  When Varda and JR go to a coastal location (which naturally evokes The Beaches of Agnès), she recalls Guy Bourdin, a young man from the area:  long ago, she several times used Guy as a photographic model.   JR and his team attach to high rocks on the shore a blown-up version of one of these photographs.  The next morning, there’s no trace of the image, thanks to the work of the sea.

    The critic Amy Taubin has called Faces Places ‘a celebration of artisanal production (including cinema), worker solidarity, and the photographic arts in the face of mortality’.    Taubin’s accurate description hints at what I find saddening about JR’s work – or at least the examples of it in this film.   Imposing greatly enlarged human faces on the built or natural environment shares with graffiti a quality of I-was-here self-assertion.  That might be said, of course, to be the impulse for any creative act but these particular forms make the self-assertion more nakedly desperate.  Agnès Varda’s art, as a film documentarian, is quieter and more heartening.  (I’m not keen on the few pieces of her non-documentary work that I’ve seen.)   And her attitude towards her own mortality, as expressed in a conversation with JR, is appealingly straightforward.   She says she thinks about death a lot, doesn’t think she’s afraid of it, realises that may change when it’s imminent.  At present, she’s looking forward to it.  When JR asks why, she says, ‘Because that’ll be that’.  If Faces Places is her last film, it’s a fine envoi.

    4 October 2018

  • Anchor and Hope

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Carlos Marqués-Marcet (2017)

    Eva (Oona Chaplin) and Kat (Natalia Tena), a lesbian couple, live together in present-day London, on a canal boat.  Kat’s Spanish friend Roger (David Verdaguer) comes to stay.  On the first night of his visit, the three of them have plenty to drink and Eva says how much she wants a baby.  She asks if Roger would be willing to donate sperm and he says yes.  In vino veritas:  the morning after, Kat, who’s not interested in parenting, is alarmed to discover that Eva hasn’t forgotten what was said under the influence.  As her plan solidifies, Kat appears to accept it; she and Eva break the news to the latter’s New Age-ish mother Germaine (Geraldine Chaplin).  Though far from hostile, Germaine is worried the set-up will lead to complications – she harks back to her own experiences of living in a commune in the 1970s.  Kat goes into a paroxysm of anti-conformism:  she accuses Germaine of knowing, even in her socially radical period, that this wouldn’t last – that she’d end up with a relatively conventional lifestyle.  Eva, with Roger’s help, soon becomes pregnant.

    Although there’s only one drunken episode in Anchor and Hope, most of the first half is like being in the company of people who are well oiled when you’re not.  The in-your-face kookiness is there from the very start, when the two young women bury their late cat in a ceremony over which Germaine presides.  Conversations involving Eva and Kat are – in terms of both the words spoken and the speech rhythms – reliably (and self-consciously) zany.  Roger does a fair amount of physical clowning around too.  There are a couple of kinky details:  Kat finds the smell of Eva’s excrement a turn-on; Roger, when he sleeps with a non-white girl (Lara Rossi), says her ‘pussy tastes of chocolate’ and she accuses him – jokily, of course – of racism.  Watching the film in the Minema at Curzon Bloomsbury intensified my stone-cold-sober feeling:  the small space was nearly full and the people nearest to me, among others, were laughing almost continuously.

    Then Eva has a miscarriage and the movie a personality transplant.  The unusual ménage and location, the surfeit of wacky talk and behaviour, eccentric songs on the soundtrack – all these suddenly count for little.  Anchor and Hope does, in effect, what Kat laid into Germaine for doing, as it settles down into standard ‘thoughtful’ romcom territory.  To be fair to the Spanish director Carlos Marqués-Marcet and Jules Nurrish, with whom he wrote the screenplay, there’s a bridge between the two halves that provides the film’s best scene.  Roger has taken much more interest than Kat in the pregnancy:  he goes with Eva for her first ultrasound and to a poncy shop that sells baby things.  There’s a piano on the canal boat; when Eva and Roger sit together at it, the intimacy the actors convey makes you wonder if Eva is veering towards a physical relationship with Roger.  Then she tells him quietly that she wants him to go back to Barcelona:  if he doesn’t, says Eva, there’s no chance of Kat engaging with the prospect of motherhood.

    Once the miscarriage and the change of tone occur (very soon after this scene), the plotting becomes mechanical.  Eva, deciding that Kat is relieved by the loss of a baby she never wanted, leaves her and moves in temporarily with Germaine, before finding a flat of her own.  Kat and Roger pick up a couple of girls they meet in a pub, one for him (Meghan Treadway), one for her (Charlotte Atkinson), and take them back to the canal boat.  But Kat can’t go through with it (once her prospective bedmate uses the toilet).  She gets Eva’s new address from Germaine and turns up there, saying she’s desperate to start again and now truly ready for them to try for a baby.  When Eva announces she’s already pregnant once more, Kat walks out and Eva watches her disappear.  Cut to Kat on the canal boat, with Roger, who’s still keeping her company there.  Eva turns up on the towpath and smiles at them.  Kat, breaking into an incredulous smile back, asks ‘Are you coming aboard?’ and the answer is yes.  The film thus ends happily.  It’s far from clear how the renewed relationship can work but time’s up and a happy ending is nicer than a sad one.

    Anchor and Hope is named for an actual pub in South East London.  The best thing about the film is the absorbing water visuals and shots of the cityscape above the canal, photographed by Dagmar Weaver-Madsen.   This is Carlos Marqués-Marcet’s second feature:  his first, 10.000 Km (2014), also had Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer in leading roles.  I don’t remember seeing Tena before:  she has a strong presence but, as Kat, she’s tiresomely self-aware and vocally mannered.  It probably doesn’t help that Tena has to deliver dialogue that often sounds effortfully improvised, with occasional interruptions of overwriting (notably in the exchange between Kat and Eva before they split after the miscarriage).  The gifted David Verdaguer, so impressive in Summer 1993, is another matter.  Even though English isn’t his native language, he shows an intuitive ability here for pointing a line and finding humour in it.  Verdaguer even made me laugh a couple of times, almost in spite of myself, at Roger’s antics.   The Chaplins, daughter and mother, both do exactly what Marqués-Marcet expects of them, though that’s not always a good thing.

    4 October 2018

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