“Since I saw Faces Places at its premiere at Cannes in May, [Agnès] Varda’s latest documentary has cemented itself on my running list of the year’s best titles,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Made with the French artist known as JR, the movie is a delightful, tenderly heart-pricking meander through art, life, history, memory and the countryside. As is often the case with Ms. Varda’s movies, this one folds in assorted detours, including a stopover in a Swiss village that poignantly brings her face to face with some of the ghosts that haunt her.”
“Inspired equally by JR’s youthful joie de vivre and the large-scale photographic portraits he produces in his makeshift mobile photo booth, Varda enlists her young counterpart for an impromptu cross-country road trip through France,” writes Jordan Cronk for Cinema Scope. “Along the way, the duo befriends a variety of locals and assorted lovable characters, whom they proceed to enshrine in enormous cut-out images and then plaster them on the sides of nearby homes and buildings. With its travelogue approach and interest in the iconographic potential of everyday people and places, the film plays as a quasi-sequel to Varda’s 1980 L.A. street-art classic Mur murs, which lovingly reflected the city’s cultural diversity through an under-recognized art form.”
At Hyperallergic, Tanner Tafelski reminds us that both artists have been in the news lately. Early last month, “the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences acknowledged Varda’s achievements in cinema by giving her an honorary Oscar. JR’s startling mural of a little boy peering over the border in Tecate, Mexico made a splash in the media.”
And at 4Columns, Melissa Anderson notes that Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, “her quasi-musical about the women’s movement that was the [New York Film Festival’s] opening-night selection in 1977, will screen at this year’s edition as part of the Revivals program.” This very afternoon, too. “A sweet, but never cloying, portrait of an intergenerational friendship and artistic collaboration, Faces Places is also a matter-of-fact meditation on mortality,” writes Anderson. “As Varda and JR scrutinize the headstones in the wee cemetery where Cartier-Bresson is buried, in the tiny town of Montjustin, the near-nonagenarian remarks that she’s looking forward to death because ‘that’ll be that’—Varda’s gallows-humor take, perhaps, on the legendary photographer’s notion of the ‘decisive moment.’”
“The whimsical tone should be familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of Varda's nonfiction work like The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and The Gleaners and I (2000), but she's also proved, in films such as Le bonheur (1965) and Vagabond (1985), equally adept at pathos,” writes Keith Uhlich. “Glimmers of darkness are everywhere here.”
“Varda continues a profound exploration of creativity and memory in the face of mortality and impermanence,” adds Fernando F. Croce in the Notebook. “A snapshot of a late friend is reproduced on a seaside rock, only for the tide to wash it away the following morning. Later on, a trio of women married to Le Havre dock workers are perched high on top of stacked crates bearing their amplified photographed likeness, in a playful yet evocative composition. . . . Varda may be struggling with an eye disease, but her vision is as crystalline as ever.”
“Varda and JR advocate a form of communalism that, in its borderline utopian presentation, would be capable of eradicating hostility, even hatred, with the aid of open conversation and artistic imagination,” writes Clayton Dillard at Slant. “What’s remarkable about Faces Places is how these sociological tenets occur through the course of both the filmmakers’ interviews and their playfulness with one another between destinations. In fact, one’s adoration for the film may depend, in part, on how much mileage one gets out of seeing Varda singing along, while cruising down a highway, to Anita Ward’s ‘Ring My Bell.’ For Varda and JR, these shenanigans are part and parcel with their approach to interacting with strangers . . . The filmmakers extend the chance to collaborate with everyone they meet and thereby develop Faces Places into something approaching a manifesto for the possibility of shared happiness.”
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“Varda’s subjectivity as an older woman is key to Faces Places,” finds Chelsea Phillips-Carr at PopMatters. “While co-directed with JR, it is her voice which comes through the most: we are seeing through her eyes almost literally at many points in the film. And her experience is specific.”
Back to Tanner Tafelski: “Faces Places is a gentle, light, and airy film. Everything that you would expect in a Varda film is there: a subjective and hyper-aware interest in and collaboration with the working class; the familiar imagery of potatoes, faces, and the sea. However, the film feels slight.”
In a similar vein, Jason Ooi, writing for the Film Stage, finds that “the film, even with its unique style and creative flairs, feels altogether a bit conventional. The easy digestibility—a product of its lightness—makes Faces Places very enjoyable in the moment, but also verges on saccharine.”
“The bassline is JR’s caring rapport with Varda, offering an organic way for her own introspections to emerge,” suggests Chloe Lizotte at Screen Slate.
Faces Places “ends up speaking to the power of the still image, while working as a good-natured, free-wheeling, and gentle late-period work from one of our honest-to-goodness living legends,” writes Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey.
At In Review Online, Paul Attard is left with “a general feeling of wonder for the possibilities artist can bring to the world.”
And it’s “arguably one of the best non-fiction features of this still infantile century,” proposes Joshua Brunsting at CriterionCast.
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