In short: Faces Places (2017)

Original title: Visages Villages

Together with photographer JR (who is credited as co-director), Agnès Varda goes on a road trip through the French countryside to meet, interview, and photograph an assortment of (predominantly) women who don’t usually get the starring roles in anything. As part of JR’s modus operandi, and certainly fitting perfectly with Varda’s approach to people in her documentaries, the duo and their assistants then plaster giant photos of their subjects on walls (and others things). There are side trips and distractions, of course, for these two clearly find the world and the people populating it endlessly fascinating and interesting. Because this is a late period Varda movie, the encounters are presented with an emotional directness that always threatens to border on the twee but rarely if ever devolves into it.

Instead, all of this feels kind and human and genuine in all the right ways. Thus the film can also encompass themes like our heroine’s blurring eye sight, aging, and threatening mortality, JR’s fixation on wearing sunglasses probably even under the shower (and what it may mean – a Godard fixation?), an encounter with his grandmother who is basically glowing with love for her grandson, and a non-encounter with fucking Godard that leaves Varda in tears and provokes JR to show her the whole of her face in a moment that feels staged and genuine at the same time. This last bit only puts further fuel on the fire of my thesis that late period (really, post-60s) Godard and late period Varda are artistically antithetical in their documentaries – he consumed by concepts and words and so completely disinterested in people or the world we live in, he can’t conceive of things like kindness as anything but abstracts; she, finding something of interest and worth in the practical lives of everybody she meets, and going out into the world to share this even when she’s old, tired and half blind. If you think I’m making an implicit value judgement here, you’re absolutely right, for I am unfortunately not as kind as Varda in her late films (though I am trying).