Varda and JR drive a camera van through rural France and paste the faces of farmers and workers onto the walls they live behind. It is slight and occasionally pleased with itself, but the faces are enormous and so, unexpectedly, is the feeling.
Agnès Varda made Faces Places with JR, a street artist a couple of generations younger than her. JR owns a van with a giant camera built into it. You sit inside it, it takes your photograph, and out comes a print large enough to cover a wall. The two of them drive this van around rural France, photograph whoever they meet, and paste the results, several storeys high, onto the walls the people live and work behind. That is the whole film. It runs 94 minutes, it is likeable from the first shot, and for perhaps a third of its length it is a good deal more than that.
The first stop is a coal town in the north, and a row of miners’ houses. Jeannine Carpentier has lived in one of them for a long time. Varda and JR photograph her and paste her face across the front of her house, the full height of the brick. When she comes out and sees it she cannot speak. Neither, for a moment, could we. It was the size that did it: a woman nobody has photographed in years, suddenly bigger than the building she lives in. The film repeats the trick a dozen times, and it is honest enough to show that not every subject is sure they like it.
The people are the point, and the film gives them room. A farmer who works a huge acreage alone from a tractor cab with a screen in it. A woman who keeps goats and will not burn off their horns, and gets a horned goat on her barn wall for her trouble. Women at the docks, photographed standing, then pasted full length onto a wall of stacked shipping containers. Varda asks short questions and lets people answer at length; JR works the ladder. Seven camera operators are credited, among them Roberto De Angelis and Claire Duguet, and the footage looks as if it was gathered on the move, in whatever light there was. The portraits themselves are black and white; the France around them is in colour.
Varda and Maxime Pozzi-Garcia cut it like a scrapbook. Each village gets a chapter, Varda talks over the joins, and Matthieu Chedid’s guitar score wanders in and out underneath. It is a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half, and that is also the film’s weakness. The Gleaners and I (2000) had a subject, people who live on what others throw away, and an argument about them. The Beaches of Agnès (2008) had her own life to put in order. This one has a method and a friend. Around the fifth or sixth village we caught ourselves admiring the pictures and waiting for the film to say something about them, and it did not.
The staged parts are the other problem. Varda and JR are filmed bickering, in a cemetery, on a beach, in the van, and the set-ups are visibly set up. The running jokes between them land the first time and are still being made at the end. Varda’s narration has a habit of telling us what the image has already shown. None of this is bad; it is simply less interesting than a farmer explaining why he no longer employs anyone, and the film keeps cutting away from the farmer to get back to the two of them.
What rescues it is Varda herself, and what she allows to be shown. Her eyesight is failing, and she says so on camera. She has spent a career looking at faces and she can no longer see them clearly at a distance, and she puts this plainly, without asking for sympathy. Late on, the road trip turns towards her own past and towards the cinema she came out of, in a way we will not describe. It is the one place the film’s good humour slips, and the best ten minutes in it.
See it with someone you have known for a long time and argued with for most of it. Certificate 12A, 94 minutes, and the largest faces in it belong to people you will not hear of again.
