FACES PLACES: Agnès Varda’s Swan Song Is Sheer Perfection

Over 60 years have passed since her stunning debut, and today, at the age of 90, Agnès Varda remains one of our most important living filmmakers. A pioneer of the French New Wave in the ’60s, Varda has continued to evolve as a director, and in her twilight years has leaned more heavily into documentary filmmaking.

Staying true to herself, Varda’s films always remain personal, delving as much into her own history as the history of the people she encounters. It’s been almost a decade since the release of her last film, The Beaches of Agnès, and even though her newest entry, Faces Places, is only slight, it’s still completely worth the wait.

Good Friends, Great Collaborators

In Faces Places, Varda teams up with friend and collaborator JR, a French artist most famous for his large photographic murals. JR is only 34, and yet the two share such chemistry it is as if they have been friends for a lifetime. In a strange turn of events, JR even shares a striking resemblance with an old friend of Varda’s, Jean-Luc Godard.

The filmmaking pair set out on a journey around France to capture the real lives of real people. They travel in a van-turned-gigantic-photo booth, allowing them to print large photographs of the people they meet on the way. They aren’t hitting Paris or Marseilles here, but instead the villages and rural countryside that is always missed in your usual cinematic story. The focus is on ordinary people, providing them with the larger than life portraits that are too often reserved for the rich and famous on the cinema screen.

Varda has always been an engaging screen presence, and she demonstrates it once more here. She is full of wonderful off-the-cuff remarks, whether about chance being her greatest assistant, or photographing people so they don’t fall down the holes of her memory. Even at 90 her energy for filmmaking is infectious. In an interview with the Financial Times in 2009 Varda stated, “I love filming real people; I love to connect with the kind of people we don’t know so well.” That passion for people fills every frame of Faces Places.

JR proves himself to be equally watchable, a charming and joyous presence on the screen. It is clear that the two are having the time of their lives from the very beginning, as a hilarious set piece shows how JR and Varda may have met. This instills the film with a cheerful positive energy from the get-go, and as an audience you cannot help but be caught up in the pair’s journey.

Finding Art in the Past

On the surface, Faces Places may seem like a road trip, where Varda and JR splatter buildings with huge portraits of everyday people. It is that (and just that would be interesting enough to be honest), but there is much more to it also. The filmmakers are consistently exploring the past and its impact on the present. They meet a lady who lives alone in a street since the local mine has shut down and everybody has left. Elsewhere they speak with a farmer who works alone now that his tools do the job of the historic farmhands.

The most obvious mention of this past is when Varda convinces JR to paste a mural of her deceased friend Guy Bourdin at a beach. The next day the pair return to find the sea has washed most of the mural away. The film finds no truer parallel to the deterioration of Varda’s own eyes and the temporary nature of memories.

These moments are naturally melancholic, but instead of dwelling in the sadness, Varda and JR allow them to be thought-provoking, and then inspiring. From each such moment the pair go quickly on the search to meet more people whom they have never met, and would never meet if they stood still.

This is the great duality that the film tackles. The young artist still at the beginning of his career helping the older auteur to look forward, whilst she helps him look back. Varda believed she would not be able to make another film after her last effort, 2008’s The Beaches of Agnes, yet JR has given her (literally) a vehicle to continue her search for new faces.

Varda in return shows JR the value of scouring the past for art in the present, never more obvious than the mural of Bourdin on a Normandy beach or the miners printed on old, empty miner’s cottages facing demolition. Despite the short runtime there is so much to unpack, and it is a film worth revisiting time and again.

Faces Places: Staying True to Her Roots

Varda has always been a trailblazer for the female view on film, from her earliest years as the only female in the boy’s club that was the French New Wave. In Faces Places she continues this, speaking in depth to the wives of dockworkers. One lady describes herself as the woman behind the man. Varda corrects her, stating she stands side by side with her husband. The women are printed as pillars in the workplace, their strength and importance on full show.

What Faces Places does so well in these moments is not make the project about showcasing ordinary people, but actually allowing the people to tell their own stories in their own words and interact with the art itself on camera.

Varda has always been a personal filmmaker, and this new project is no different, whether it is the people they meet, or her eyesight or her memories. As the film nears its conclusion, Varda’s friendship with Jean-Luc Godard and her marriage to Jacques Demy come to the forefront, having bubbled in the background throughout the runtime.

It proves to be the perfect moment to bring Varda’s story full circle and we are met with real heartbreak. This may very well be the 90-year-old auteur’s final film, and if it is, it’s the perfect way to come to an end: with a glance to her past and a focus on all the wonderful people there are still to meet in the world.

Have you managed to see Faces Places yet? Do you think it is the perfect finale for Varda’s career if this in fact her last film?

Faces Places is released in the UK on September 21^st 2018.