by Sav Robinson
for Reviewing the Arts
Faces Places is everything you’d expect, and yet, everything you wouldn’t, from a French documentary. The film is faithful to the captivating customs of the French New Wave cinema that preceded it; the viewer is immediately immersed into a world characterized by jump cuts, minimally embellished visuals, and condensed, even occasionally sharp or witty dialogue, all to the score of subtle music-box sounds.
The film even seems to follow the formula for romantic relationships often essential to French filmmaking, which features the “unlikely” couple that manifests first out of happenstance, and then, intentional infatuation, who the rest of the understated world around it seems to orbit. “I made the first move,” the male lead even proclaims in regards to his other half. Yet, this nod to the customary “unlikely” partnership is short-lived and obviously unlikely for more reasons than one, considering that the male protagonist is JR, whose name is commonplace in French muralist art, and his “other half” is beloved veteran French New Wave filmmaker, Agnès Varda (who is nearly 60 years his senior).
It is from this play on convention, nevertheless, that viewers are guided into the nature of their lighthearted companionship, from which, sprouts an even still lighthearted creative collaboration; that is, a documented venture through rural France to foster connections with people they may have never met otherwise. “It’ll be fun making a film together,” Varda, known for her rather tenacious, lone-wolf spirit, notes to JR as the camera delights in a delicate frame of the two with their meal of fresh clementines and French pastries. “That’s our starting point,” JR confidently affirms back.
JR was right. At the moment we come to understand how their acquaintance formed, what works of each others they admire, and how their relationship has continued to progress, we also realize that, while their connection solidifies and underlines many of the overarching themes present in the documentary, it does not orbit around it, solely.
On a foundational level, the film follows Varda and JR as they visit different regions to meet communities of people, photograph new faces “so they don’t fall down the hole of [Varda’s] memory,” and create large portraits of them to plaster on their surroundings. The duo’s first major stop is a small town in Northern France lined with a row of miners’ houses that were slated for demolition. It is here where they meet Jeanine, a sprite, silver-haired woman who, through small conversation, they come to find, is the last inhabitant on the street. “I said I’d be the last to go, and I’m still here,” she declares, a bold jump-cut revealing her feet planted firmly to the concrete beneath her. “They won’t throw me out. I have too many memories here.”
Jeanine readily recounts these memories to Varda and JR, which includes her fondness for her family’s “alouette bread,” or the “grimy” fragments of buttered bread her father would bring home to them after a long day’s work at the mines. In fact, the only time we see her soften into speechlessness is when the camera zooms-in on her tearful face as Varda and JR reveal how they have paid homage to her resistance—by plastering her face beside her front door, and thus unmistakably marking her home as hers, for the rest of the portrait’s durable life.
Still, there were people who were, somewhat to the viewer’s surprise, jolted in a different way by seeing such a gigantic, enduring portrait of themselves smeared across buildings and other recognizable monuments for all to see. For example, Nathalie, the owner of the café in a village named Chérence, though appreciative of the sentiment, was less-than ecstatic about the portrait adorning her brick café walls. “I didn’t think the picture would be so big,” she proclaimed. Addressing the root of her concern, she continued, “seeing people take my picture everyday bother[s] me...It’s pretty weird to see a picture of yourself on the Internet, on Instagram, everywhere.” Nonetheless, such a response—as any of the other varying responses in the film—is completely valid. No one seems to understand this more than Varda and JR, whose commitment to creating as full of a picture of rural French life as possible, is both commendable and entirely necessary.
Overall, Faces Places finds its strength and intrigue in the mundane—nothing is particularly striking in the sense that the documentary is quite calm and unassuming throughout, in that customary French film way. But that’s the whole point; humanity matters, “ordinary” lives matter, because we assign meaning to them. We do this through anchoring ourselves to different homes, occupations, passions, people, and of course, all the timeless memories these irreplaceable treasures inspire.