Boston International/Arthouse Movie Meetup Group

FACES PLACES, Agnès Varda and JR (2017) / Countryfolk and the camera

Sat, Oct 31 · 7:20 PM EDT

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Online

Online

89-year old Agnès Varda, one of the leading figures of the French New Wave, and acclaimed 33 year-old French photographer and muralist JR teamed up to co-direct this enchanting documentary/road movie. Kindred spirits, Varda and JR share a lifelong passion for images and how they are created, displayed, and shared. Together they travel around the villages of France in JR’s photo truck meeting locals, learning their stories and producing epic-size portraits of them. The photos are prominently displayed on houses, barns, storefronts, and trains, revealing the humanity in their subjects and themselves. Faces Places documents these heart-warming encounters as well as the unlikely, tender friendship they formed along the way. [Cohen Media Group]

HOW THIS WORKS
Once you've RSVPed, visit JustWatch for links to rent, stream, or buy Faces Places. (It's available on the free streaming service Kanopy.) View it on your own during the week, then join our Zoom conversation this Saturday 10/31 at 7:20p. Your Zoom link will appear on the upper right of this page. First-timers must RSVP by Friday 10/30 in order to attend.

Written and directed by and starring Agnès Varda and JR
Produced by Rosalie Varda
Cinematography: Claire Duguet, Nicolas Guicheteau, Valentin Vignet, Romain Le Bonniec, Raphaël Minnesota, Roberto De Angelis, Julia Fabry
Edited by Agnès Varda and Maxime Pozzi Garcia
Music composed by Matthieu Chedid
Release dates: 19 May 2017 (Cannes), 6 October 2017 (U.S.)
Running time: 1h 30m
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As the midterms rage and protests in France devolve into violence, we turn to this quiet winsome classic from nine years ago to ask after the source of human connectedness and what can withstand our crises. Strikingly, Varda and her younger comrade seem able to cross whatever boundaries might exist between themselves as artists and the lives of ordinary others. Much can be attributed to the humanistic nature of JR's project, bringing a heroic scale to daily existence. But something in the making of photos and cinema penetrates more deeply beneath the surface of the relationships revealed. Varda and JR, a classic odd couple, form a paradigm, where the generational gap between them becomes not a dividing gulf but a medium for creating new human resonances. By the time Faces Places flickers to a close, we sense that something has been catalyzed for all concerned, that truths recognized in faces unfamiliar and easily overlooked have taken on a life of their own, summoning those who've witnessed them to continue engaging a great chain of creation, reproducing the available miracles of the everyday.

"An 88-year-old Varda teams up with the much younger visual artist JR in a tour of France, built around JR’s practice of making huge blow-ups of his photographs of ordinary people and affixing them to the places where his subjects live or work. Like Varda’s groundbreaking The Gleaners and I, Visages Villages is both personal and populist, a celebration of artisanal production (including cinema), worker solidarity, and the photographic arts in the face of mortality. Varda and JR wielded cameras themselves but they were also documented in their travels by multiple image and sound recordists. Out of this often spontaneous jumble, Varda and her editor Maxime Pozzi-Garcia created a work that is vivid, lyrical, and inspiringly humanistic." ∞ Amy Taubin, Film Comment

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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKbjnLpxv70

Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer: 99% based on 143 reviews
Metacritic: 94 (universal acclaim), "Must See"

At the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Faces Places won the L'Œil d'Or award, given for the best documentary. It won the Best Documentary at the 33rd Independent Spirit Awards and the 2017 award for Best Non-Fiction Film by the New York Film Critics Circle. Time Magazine listed it as one of its top ten films of 2017, and it was nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 90th Academy Awards, In July 2025, it ranked number 23 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century."

Faces Places was Agnès Varda's second-to-last cinematic work before her death. It was followed by the two-episode 2019 documentary series, Varda by Agnès, which offers a retrospective look at her career.

Read Scott Tafoya of RogerEbert.com's 2017 interview with Varda here: https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/agnes-varda-and-jr-on-faces-places

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BLURBS & ATTITUDES
Despite its unassuming, conversational ethos — which is also to say by means of Ms. Varda’s staunchly democratic understanding of her job as a filmmaker — Faces Places reveals itself as a powerful, complex and radical work. Ms. Varda’s modesty is evidence of her mastery, just as her playful demeanor is the expression of a serious and demanding aesthetic commitment. Almost by stealth, but also with cheerful forthrightness, she communicates a rich and challenging array of feelings and ideas. As we contemplate those faces and places we are invited to reflect on the passage of time and the nature of memory, on the mutability of friendship and the durability of art, on the dignity of labor and the fate of the European working class .... Beneath the jauntiness and good humor there is an unmistakably elegiac undertone to this film, an implicit acknowledgment of lateness and loss. The places will crumble and the faces will fade, and the commemorative power of the images that JR and Ms. Varda make will provide a small and partial compensation for this gloomy inevitability. The world and its inhabitants are protean and surprising, but also almost unbearably fragile, and you feel the pull of gravity even in the film’s most lighthearted passages .... Faces Places is unforgettable, not because of dramatic moments or arresting images, but because once you have seen it you want to keep it with you, like a talisman or a souvenir. Wherever you’re going, it will surely come in handy. ∞ A.O. Scott, The New York Times

There is a bracing buoyancy to Faces Places that truly is life affirming. JR, a relative beginner in the journey of capturing the world before him, is contrasted with Varda, a filmmaker acutely aware of her own mortality and determined to squeeze every ounce of joy and discovery out of what’s still ahead. It’s not an art-house curiosity or a pretty-postcard fantasy – it isn’t like any movie you’ve ever seen. Instead, this indescribable, incredible journey presents the world not as Hollywood sees it, but as it really is. That such is a vision is so rare speaks volumes about our corrupted culture. There is a sadness in the film as it speaks of the impermanence of life, but there’s no denying the elation of Varda and JR as the leap fearlessly into the art of making art. The clash of their generations harmonize here into an exhilarating gift. ∞ Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

The film is an intensely personal record, yet also a universal contemplation. Faces Places leaves the viewer with a sense of the glories of images and communication – sometimes random, sometimes specific, always continual and cumulative. ∞ Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle

Just when your feelings about film culture and human nature couldn’t get any grimmer, along comes a film like Faces Places to restore your faith in both .... It's a film of sheer joy, its exuberance surpassed only by its tenderness and purity of purpose. ∞ Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

Varda and JR get along famously, making choice remarks at the expense of themselves and each other (Varda pokes fun at his insistence on wearing a hat and shades, and he makes jokes about her wrinkles and feet), and they appear to have a lot in common as artists, but JR takes a step back, trusting this master’s experience and clarity of vision, giving her the opportunity to reflect on her artistic contributions and personal friendships. There is a perfect balance that uses just the right amount of these personal anecdotes to keep it feeling genuine and prevent self-gratification, and the stories of their muses are used as a juncture through which Varda recalls memories that tie their present to her past (a sequence in which they interview and photograph goat farmers invites reflections of notable photography from her youth), effectively showing a candid, accessibly playful, yet pragmatic side of this cinematic legend’s down-to-earth work ethic ....Visages, villages begins as a light-hearted glance into their generous passion project, but the depth and power of what it portends glides into meaningful, gentle dominance. What could have very easily been a vanity piece in the hands of another director becomes a beautifully moving celebration of the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people, particularly as a love letter to the beauty of aging. As much as the film delivers a full sense of who Agnès Varda and JR are as people, what their rapport is like, they really show true humility in making a film where every ordinary person is a star, and their loving portraits give a voice and legacy to the faces we overlook. ∞ David Acacia, International Cinephile Society

Varda is intent on tracking down the soul of her country as it still exists in France’s small towns and working-class inhabitants. The documentary is an absolute delight, but it has a faith in everyday folks that feels both stalwart and melancholy, aware that these are exactly the people being swept away by the tides of modernity. It’s a sociopolitical cri de coeur disguised as a vacation. ∞ Ty Burr, Boston Globe

Faces Places is a subtly self-reflexive documentary that swims against this tide, inviting audiences to see that filmmaking is a process of having conversations with people, and enveloping each individual and their private creativity within the wider collaborative process. Art is a form of social work or, rather, it can be with the right people at the helm. ∞ Sophie Monks Kaufman, Little White Lies