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
