Agnès Varda: “You see everything dark, and you’re happy. It all depends on how one sees things.”
With Faces Places (or, my preference being the original French title, the beautifully mellifluous Visages villages) Agnès Varda returns to the fertile ground of her earlier Murs murs and Les glaneurs et la glaneuse with another revelatory journey of discovery “to meet new faces so I don’t fall down the holes in my memory.”
A sprightly 88 years old at the time of shooting, Agnès Varda might find that the flesh is weakening, but the spirit is unquestionably as potent as ever. This time around, she has a partner in adventure, the self-styled photograffeur JR, a fellow traveller who cleaves to the belief that the street is "the largest art gallery in the world".
Together in JR’s visually striking photo booth truck (one of the essential tools of his "Inside Out Project"), the two of them drive around the South of France to indulge their creativity and sate their curiosity, with an attitude of serendipitous discovery as their guide. Agnès remarks that “chance has always been my best assistant.” (Agnès singing along to Anita Ward’s Ring My Bell as they tool around the French countryside is most definitely one of my favourite big-screen moments of the year).
And so the picaresque travelogue begins - a playful odyssey with many stops: from the abandoned half-finished village which attracts a gathering of locals making art, eating together and plastering pictures of their faces on the side of the ruins; to the German WWII concrete bunker embedded at an angle on a beach after having fallen of a cliff edge. JR and Agnès paste an image of her late friend Guy Bourdin on the block. The following morning, they discover that the image has been washed away by the tide.
That inadvertently sums up the ineffable allure of Faces Places - the inherently ephemeral nature of public art (and life), and yet the camera doesn’t forget a thing. The film itself is the permanent document. The remembrance.
Remembrance and mortality are deep in the heart of Faces Places. Our explorers make a pilgrimage to the Cimetière de Montjustin to pay their respects at the graves of husband-and-wife photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck in a remembrance of their lives and work. It’s not just about seeking out the New, but holding on to the Past whilst we can, but never in a way that is maudlin. It’s a film of enormous celebratory joy and compassion.
That delicate tension in the film between the joie de vivre of creation and invention and imagination in contrast to the transience of lives and loved ones and art lost is what really makes Faces Places sing. It’s particularly pronounced when the film arrives at the closest thing it has to a narrative thread: an attempt to visit Varda’s former comrade from the era of the Nouvelle Vague and old friend Jean-Luc Godard.
Without spoiling how that all plays out, I couldn’t help but reflect on the crucial, fundamental difference between Varda and Godard. The warm, inquisitive, deeply humanist Agnès wants to get out into the world and meet people; the clinical, formalist philosopher JLG appears to want isolation. Agnès occasionally berates JR for his predilection for dark glasses. They mask his eyes - a barrier to intimacy, perhaps hiding what he really thinks and feels. Like Godard before him, JR’s glasses are a prop, an inextricable part of his public-facing persona. And yet maybe in this instance her new friend JR is better than her old friend Godard? Maybe it’s just a matter of perspective.
This is starting to run long, but I can’t help myself. Faces Places contains multitudes. This piece could be double the length and I still won’t have covered everything about the film that moved me or delighted me or inspired me. I haven’t touched on the image of shipping crates at Le Havre port dancing around Agnès and JR, or the visit to a factory that results in an impromptu table tennis match between JR and the factory’s safety officer, or the tribute to Godard’s Bande á part - a recreation of the Louvre run, with JR pushing along Agnès in a wheelchair. I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of the escapades of the two friends and artists who "make images together, but differently".
Very few filmmakers have the ability to make you look at the world around you with fresh eyes. Agnès Varda has been letting us look through the windows to her soul for sixty-three years and counting. I’ll sign off with one last vox populi - the words of Pony, a homeless artist they encounter on their journey:
“I was born in the shadow of a star. My mother, the moon, gave me her coolness. My father, the sun, gave me his warmth and the universe to live in. Imagine that. I have so much in this life.”
Faces Places is in cinemas and on demand in the UK from Friday 21st September 2018.
