The many faces of France

The many faces of France

The documentary Visages, Villages (Faces Places) goes deep to find its story

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
The many faces of France

At the simplest level Agnes Varda's and JR's Visages Villages is a documentary film about photography and art-making. Going slightly deeper, as the title suggests, it's a film about faces and places, about people and their villages -- rural communities, farmland, factories and towns in the unglamorous corners of France. And yet at its most moving, most humanist moments, this film by an 89-year-old filmmaker and a 33-year-old street artist is about the heartbreaking ephemerality of art, about mortality, memory and the transient nature of everything, above all of life itself.

It's also a film about France, coal-mining, dock-working, factory-manning, bartending, goat-milking France that smiles its gap-toothed smile at its visitors. And ultimately, it's a film about image and its power (or powerlessness, maybe) to remember and reconcile.

In any case, this is a warm, generous movie that we all should go and watch. Then we should keep it in our hearts, because it reminds us that if we look, there's something for everyone on this cruel Earth.

Varda, the so-called Grandmother of the French New Wave who has made films for over 60 years, finds her match in JR, the hipsterish photographer whose huge photographs -- his postmodern murals -- are pasted on walls, trains and water towers as well as Paris' Pantheon. Together the duo strikes an impish chemistry as they roam the back roads of France to look for faces, places and stories. JR's van is equipped with a large-format printing machine, and wherever they go, the two artists photograph people and paste their gigantic pictures on the walls.

Why? Because it's art. Or, as Varda puts it to a train-yard worker who asks her: "It's the power of imagination." Viewers also gather that this is how they celebrate the small people -- farmers, coal miners, dockworkers, bartenders, factory workers -- by making them larger than life and putting their images up there, towering above everything.

In the wrong hands, or in the exploitative trap of the modern art world, this could come across as a tad patronising, a conscious, faux-left slumming whereby celebrity artists take on the attributes of the poor working class. But that's not the case here; it's the opposite, actually. Varda, who rose to the forefront of avant garde cinema in the 1960s along with the male enfants terribles of the era such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and the rest, has shown an interest in the life of the poor and the forgotten for over half a century, and in Visages Villages, her unselfconscious, grandmotherly curiosity about the small wonders of life remains infinite and simply genuine.

The film takes us on a pleasant ride punctuated by the bantering between Varda and JR. Where did you two meet, a factory worker asks JR at one point. "On a dating site," he deadpans. "I don't like that joke," Varda quips. Together they meet a farmer who looks after 2,000 acres of land with the help of a hi-tech tractor, and who beams when he sees his picture plastered on the wall of his barn. They meet a postman who has been doing what he does for decades and who, besides delivering letters, also buys groceries for an old lady in the village. When the two filmmakers visit a shipyard in the port city of Le Havre, the domain of rough, strong dockworkers, Varda asks to photograph their wives, and the result is one of the film's most unforgettable images.

They also meet a woman who, after seeing her photograph blown up and pasted on a wall, expresses doubt about the implications of such image-making: the wall photo makes her village famous and people have come to take photos of her photo, and she's not sure if she's happy seeing her face flooding social media like that.

In an age when everyone is obsessed with photos of themselves, Visages Villages acknowledges that they're contributing to the overabundance of images in the world -- and yet, more importantly, what the film also reminds us is that even images are not permanent. JR's technique means the photos will soon peel away and disappear. In the most poignant episode of the journey, Varda and JR visit a lonely beach in Normandy where, 50 years ago, she took pictures of her friend who has since passed away. "Sometimes I remember the image of him better than I can remember him," she says.

That makes Visages Villages a film about memory, good and bad, sometimes aided by the presence of photographs, small or large, clear or faded. Varda, entering her ninth decade, at one point takes us to a cemetery where the grave of the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson lies. It's a brief sequence, quiet and solemn, and its allusion to death, memory, beauty, and the decisive moments in photographs and in life, sums up the exquisite meanings of this luminous film.

Agnès Varda and JR in Visages Villages.

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