C'est incroyable! Agnès Varda is either a genius with heart or a heartfelt genius - or both.
Faces Places - Belgian-born Varda's collaboration with French/worldwide visual/photo-performance artist JR - is an artist's art film. It is a tribute to her commitment to the essential honoring of life itself.
Although it's tempting to ignore the 55-year age difference between the 34-year-old JR and the nearly-89-year-old Varda, the tenderness and vision formed between them is a result of their respective experiences of age and era.
After meeting briefly only once, the two agree to act on their mutual, intuitive, and magnetic pull to explore the French countryside and its people, its stories, its pains and joys.
As filmmakers and photographers, they dig deep into their collaboration, with honesty and compassion for both process and subject/object.
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Varda says in the film, “JR and I are investigating. Each person I meet feels like my last.” Their methodology - or particular lack thereof - is announced by Varda early on: “Chance has always been my best assistant.”
Person after person greeted in the film becomes a well-known friend as JR brings his staff and special large-print truck on the journey, at each stop creating giant cut-out photographs of the “stars of the moment.”
When they pull into a near ghost-town of a mining community, it is as if the circus or a traveling Punch and Judy show stopped through for a magical moment. This visit, early on, is one of the most moving. The solitary resident - a former miner's wife - is the “star,” featured along with long-gone miners as chorus.
Between each scene, viewers are treated to classic Varda language: moving-vehicle dolly shots of sunflowers, cows, even sheep “dancing” around in a circle. (She comments that the youngest ones are always on the outside moving faster.) A calming musical score allows for a bit of relaxation between visual vessels or phrases of time and place.
JR's black-and-white photographic images are spectacular unto themselves. In each setting - countryside, unfinished-cinderblock-building community, toppled seaside World War II bunker, or container shipyard - he and Varda argue and discuss which ones to use and which surfaces they should paste to.
But, more than anything, it's the people who matter; their lives, their loves; their losses.
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These brilliant artists focus on the physical eyes of the other and of the self as well. They tease us into glimpses of their pasts, including a grandmother and Jean Luc Godard.
Varda, by the way, is famous as one of the first French New Wave filmmakers. She will be honored, along with the likes of Donald Sutherland, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Governors Awards on Nov. 11 for lifetime achievement in film.