Faces Places

Plot

Varda, tiny and white-haired with a two-tone bowl cut, meets JR and agrees on the shape of the project. She explains that his photography does what she has always wanted to do: freeze images of people before they slip out of her memory forever¹⁹. JR, almost never seen without a hat and dark glasses, drives them through rural France in a truck fitted out as a photo booth and painted to look like an enormous camera, complete with one giant eye on its side²⁰. In each town they set up the booth, photograph whoever wanders in, print the portraits in huge black-and-white strips, and paste them onto local walls.

The encounters come one after another, each a small portrait of a life. A farmer tends 2,000 acres entirely alone, with machinery that has replaced every human hand²¹; they paste his face on his barn and discuss whether machines have made people obsolete. A village waitress gets a building-sized portrait in the town square, and the whole village turns out for the unveiling. Factory workers on a night shift are pasted on their own factory wall; later, a change of ownership strips those portraits away, making the impermanence of the art painfully literal. A goat farmer refuses all modern help with her herd, insisting on her raw milk and her rough methods, and Varda and JR argue with her about tradition without ever condescending to her. In a coal town in France's north, where the mines have shut down, they find Jeanine, the last resident of a row of miners' cottages slated for demolition²².

In that mining village, JR and Varda paste building-sized portraits of the miners who once lived there, and of Jeanine herself, onto the row houses, and Jeanine stands in front of her own face at three stories tall and weeps. Varda tells her, "We wanted to pay homage to you... On a large scale"²³. A woman about to lose her home watches her street become, for a few days, a monument to the people who lived and worked there, and the film lets the moment breathe without commentary.

On the beaches of Normandy comes the film's most famous sequence. Varda has carried for decades a photograph she took in the 1950s of a young, pre-fame Guy Bourdin, walking along the sand. She wants to enlarge it and paste it on a German bunker left over from the war, so the young man strides across the concrete once more. They do it, and by the next morning the tide has come in and washed most of it away. "Ephemeral art is my stock in trade," JR says wistfully, and Varda, who wanted the picture to last, has to accept that the disappearing is part of the work²⁴.

Other stops include the docks of Le Havre, where the wives of dockworkers are pasted onto shipping containers stacked hundreds of feet high, giving the men's unseen families a monumental presence on the waterfront¹⁹. JR's 100-year-old grandmother sits for her portrait, and the film pauses on what a century of living looks like. Between stops the two directors bicker, tease, and gently probe each other, and Varda keeps returning to one grievance: she wants to see JR's eyes, and he refuses to take off the sunglasses.

On the island of Ouessant, JR has arranged a surprise paste-up for Varda. She arrives hoping to repay him with a photograph she loves, a self-portrait of the painter Bonnard at his window, his eyes plainly visible. In front of the finished work, she asks JR to take off his glasses in return. He refuses. She calls it a betrayal, half laughing and entirely serious, and the argument becomes the film's quiet thesis: one artist's anonymity is the other artist's subject, and neither will yield.

The trip ends in Paris with a pilgrimage. Varda's old friend and New Wave rival Jean-Luc Godard has agreed to meet them, and Varda is visibly, touchingly excited to see him again after decades. They recreate the famous racing-through-the-Louvre sequence from his Bande à part, running past the paintings with their carts²¹. Then they arrive at Godard's home, and he does not show. He leaves only a cryptic note. Varda sits on the stairs, hurt in a way that no 89-year-old is supposed to be hurt, and says she will never forgive him, then admits she will. To comfort her, JR does the one thing he has never done in the entire film: he takes off his glasses, and Varda looks at his eyes, blurred as her failing vision allows. The film ends there, on a face finally seen.

Characters

Agnès Varda (as herself) is the film's soul: curious, sharp-tongued, and increasingly candid about her age and her fading eyesight, which becomes one of its running subjects. She directs the film as she seems to live, turning ordinary encounters into small essays on memory and attention, and her excitement over the Godard meeting exposes the human core beneath the New Wave mythology²⁵.

JR (as himself) is her foil and game companion, a photographer who travels Europe in a van that is a photo booth, always in a hat and dark glasses, about one-third Varda's age¹³. He nudges her into adventures she claims are too much for her, she needles him about the glasses, and the film shows the friction between a 33-year-old and an 89-year-old without pretending it does not matter.

The people they meet, from Jeanine to the lone farmer to JR's grandmother, are not interview subjects but collaborators in the paste-ups, and the film treats their faces as the real cast.

Interpretations and controversies

Because Varda was 88 when the film was made, much was made of the possibility that it could be her last, which gave its meditation on impermanence an unintended weight²⁴. The ending has divided viewers: some read JR's removal of the sunglasses as a generous gift of intimacy, others as a consolation that lets him keep his art intact while giving Varda only a blurred glimpse. At the Academy Awards, the film's loss of the Best Documentary prize to Icarus was widely called the night's biggest upset by its admirers.