Faces Places (France, 2017)
Directed and written by Agnès Varda and J. R.
Faces Places is a road trip movie like none other, in which a renowned elderly filmmaker travels through France with a photographer in his thirties, engaging with people in small towns, farms, and factories. It expresses the highest purpose of art, which is to help us see others and ourselves with new eyes.
We live in a celebrity culture, and the entertainment business thrives by assessing some actors as “bankable,” those who are likely to bring in tons of money, while writing off others as too unattractive or too old to succeed. How refreshing to find that Agnès Varda, one of France’s national treasures, is not troubled that none of her films did well at the box office. “I don’t relate to success,” she has said. “I relate to making films.”1 And making films is what she did: beginning when she was twenty-five years old and ending not long before her death at ninety-one, she directed sixty-two of them.
Varda is an inspiration to any of us, demonstrating that true success means following our deepest desires, even if it means taking risks and ignoring social norms. She once explained in an interview that in the 1950s to become a film director in France, you first had to work as an apprentice, then as a third assistant director, then a second assistant director, then a first assistant director, and finally, when you were in your forties, you could direct. In 1955, with a background as a photographer and no experience in filmmaking, Varda and a small crew shot her first movie, La Pointe Courte.
The film is set in a fishing village in the South of France where Varda had lived as a child during World War II, and she proudly states that it contains “no dramatic events.” Instead, like much of her work, it presents ordinary people in ordinary situations and includes both nonactors and professionals in its cast. The film exemplifies a principle that guided Varda over the years as she filmed neighbors working as bakers, butchers, and grocers: “Nothing is banal if you film people with empathy and love.”
Varda and her husband, film director Jacques Demy, were precursors of the French New Wave in cinema that emerged in the 1950s. Directors including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol defied conventional filmmaking in favor of experimenting with narrative and tackling major political and social issues. Within this movement Varda went her own way, focusing on women’s issues and making documentaries about people on the outskirts of society.
Even Hollywood failed to seduce her. In the mid-1960s, following the success of her husband’s film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a major studio invited him to Los Angeles to discuss a potential movie project. Varda says, “I followed like a good little wife, but I said if I don’t like America, I’m going back.” But she loved California, and while she was there, firmly believing, as she has said, that “chance has always been my best assistant,” she tracked down a rumor of a possible relative, an artist in Sausalito. When she went to meet him, she found that he was her father’s cousin, Jean, living on a houseboat that, given Varda’s passion for bright colors, could have been a prop in one of her movies. She quickly decided to film their encounter and after a day and a half had a sweet eighteen-minute short, Uncle Yanko (1968).
Varda has said that three words have been essential in making her art: inspiration, creativity, and sharing. These strike me as important for any human endeavor: parenting, teaching, living a meaningful life. Varda had always centered her photographs and films on other people, but in 2000, when she was seventy-two, she found that newly available handheld digital cameras greatly enhanced her ability to approach others in a nonintimidating way. The Gleaners and I (2000) is one compelling result: initially inspired by Varda’s observing people scavenging leftovers as an outdoor market closed, the film became a meditation on a centuries-old tradition in France.
The Widows of Noirmoutier (2006), which to my mind is Varda’s most moving film, takes place in a small Breton fishing village. In a little over an hour, several women tell you everything about what it means to be a widow. Some were married for over fifty years, others for a few months. As they show faded wedding photographs and talk about their husbands’ last days or the circumstances of their deaths and how they have coped with the devastating absence, it all rings true. When she made the film, Varda had been a widow for sixteen years, and you sense that these women are not only trusting her with their stories but confiding much that they have not admitted to anyone before.
Inspiration, creativity, and sharing are much in evidence in the delightful Faces Places (2017), as is Varda’s daring nature. Few eighty-eight-year-olds would go on a road trip with a thirty-three-year-old in a hipster hat and shades in order to make a film. Few directors of any age would insist on funding the film with crowdsourcing to have complete freedom over its content.
But the photographer J. R. and Varda admired each other’s work and decided to work together on a project in which they would take what Varda calls his “magic truck,” a mobile photography studio that creates larger-than-life images, to rural and industrial areas in France. They then photographed people who volunteered to have their images placed on walls in their towns or in the factories or farms where they work. In one town people provided old photographs of their fathers and grandfathers, miners who had worked at a long-closed mine. The film crew enlarged the photographs and pasted them on the brick walls of row houses that had housed the miners and their families. One woman gasps upon seeing a photograph of her grandfather covering the building where she still lives, the last resident on a block scheduled for demolition. “What can I say?” she murmurs as she begins to weep.
The tall, lanky J. R. and diminutive Varda make an odd couple. There is plenty of love but also some intergenerational banter: “You’re playing the wise grandmother,” J. R. says, and Varda replies, “And you play the spirited young man.” Varda shows J. R. an old film clip to prove that she once got Jean-Luc Godard to remove his sunglasses for her, implying that he could do the same. “They’re not friendly,” she says. But we learn, when J. R. takes Varda to meet his one-hundred-year-old grandmother, that he is not the too-cool-for-school guy he appears to be. He and his grandmother share a warm affection—her nickname for him is “Little Sweetie”—and we sense that his understanding of the aged runs deep. When he asks Varda if she’s afraid of death, she replies that she thinks about it a lot, but adds, “I’m looking forward to it, because that’ll be that.”
Varda’s increasingly blurred vision requires medical intervention. But she and J. R. play with it in a humorous way. They have people sit on tiers and hold up letters like the ones used in a vision test. People with the largest letters sit on the top row, and the letters dwindle in size with each row down. Varda likes the display but asks J. R. to tell the people to jiggle the letters up and down, because that is closer to what she sees with impaired vision.
The film ends on a poignant note. If Varda’s fame and success have made her more open to the world, they have caused her old friend Godard to withdraw. When she goes to his home for an arranged visit, she is shocked to find the door locked, with no message left for her. J. R. tries to comfort Varda when her disappointment causes her to talk, uncharacteristically, more about the past than the present. What J. R. does with his sunglasses then is cause for celebration.
Faces Places was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary, making Varda the oldest person ever nominated for a competitive Oscar. In 2019, when she was ninety-one, Varda gave her last interview, saying, “I fought for radical cinema all my life.”2 We need such radical artists who are more interested in truth than in success. We need people like Varda in every human endeavor, who don’t mistake the trappings of success for the real thing, who seek to touch other people on a deep level. Varda reminds me to keep a low profile, never to think of myself as a “famous author,” and to be wary of anyone who applies that term to me. I believe Varda would agree that the artist is best served by not being the center of attention but the attentive observer in the corner, the person no one notices.
A reviewer in the New York Times called Varda’s last film, Varda by Agnes (2019), a retrospective look at her career, “a final visit with an irreplaceable filmmaker” who somehow feels like everyone’s friend.3 That’s a fitting description for a woman, a born humanist, who says that she made films in order to share them. I will revisit and savor Varda’s films for the rest of my life.
Throughout Faces Places we’re provoked to ask, What do you want, and how will you ask for it?
I’m touched by the delightful friendship between the elder stateswoman of French cinema and an emerging artist who understands himself enough to recognize that there are both things he does not know and things he must do. One face after another, expanded massively on the walls of their houses or barns, reveals the mundane as spectacular, honoring human beings as just “a little lower than the angels.”
J. R. and Varda say they are “paying homage to the ordinary on a large scale,” and their tender friendship is part of this. Varda’s awareness of her mortality and the desire to create “as many images as we can before it’s too late” is moving, married to J. R.’s spontaneity and a commitment to have no itinerary.
Varda’s experience of Jean-Luc Godard at the end of Faces Places isn’t just about her relationship with a notoriously difficult man or the history of cinema. Even if we have never seen their films, pretty much anyone alive today who is influenced by European culture has been touched by Varda and Godard, so it’s about two people who shaped our experience of ourselves. It’s also about archetypal regret for the past.
If we haven’t already identified with the faces and places that have appeared prior to this awful moment of abandonment, Varda’s grief at Godard’s rejection calls us in. We know this feeling. But J. R.’s sunglasses are authentically rose-colored—the color of cheeks when tears fall, even tears of joy. We know this feeling too. You can’t go home again, but if you learn to dance with other people’s imperfections, you can make a new home with the people who will love you now.
We can imagine what Varda and Godard’s reunion, titans of cinema and intimate friends, could have been. But this is far more about what life is really like—the ebb and flow of relationships creaking and challenging, living and dying. But it’s Godard’s tragedy, not Varda’s. She knows that a self-image constructed by either the superficial acclaim of a crowd or an ideologically driven outsized notion of one’s own importance isn’t success at all. The measure of who you are has to do with the size of your heart.
It’s an extravagant act of generosity for Agnès Varda to share this window into her own vulnerability and not to wrap things up with simple catharsis. The sad-happy story ends with a delicious joke that invites us to remember that you never know when a story is over, especially when you’re in it; we are invited—literally—to see the world through Varda’s eyes, and it validates our own dreams.
This is a movie about what really matters—not “winning” but becoming ourselves. It urges me to ask myself, What is the central story of me? From what vantage point do I read my own life? Do I truly recognize that your life has the same value to you as mine does to me?
And I am so attracted to Varda’s deceptive lack of sophistication, which in her films is an invitation to something profound: If most of life is constituted by an encounter with faces, places, and stories, shouldn’t I slow down enough to actually experience them?