Visages Villages (Faces Places)

Visages Villages is a cheerful, if realistically elegiac, documentary directed jointly by JR, a street artist, and the great French filmmaker, Agnes Varda.  The movie celebrates Homo Ludens, the human capacity for play that motivates all art no matter how earnest or, even, tragic.  Indeed, the film begins with playful montage that is one of its best sequences.  Varda who is 89 travels in different circles than JR, a brash young man  and Parisian equivalent to Banksy who wears dark glasses perpetually as if in homage to Jean-Luc Godard, a figure who assumes some importance as the film proceeds.  The movie shows little vignettes about how JR didn't meet Varda in a café or hitchhiking or walking in the country; in each vignette, we see the two artists as they momentarily occupy the same frame before departing in their own different directions.  Instead, Varda goes to JR's office where people are peering into computer screens and answering phones and there they hatch the plan of traveling the French countryside, going from village to village plastering available walls with huge photographs of the people in the town -- Varda is interesting in faces, hands, and feet; JR likes provocation of working on a monumental scale in public places... and so the odd couple set forth in JR's van, a portable film-developing lab, to make poster art, some of it enormous, that can plastered onto barns and watertowers and shipping containers to create vast black-and-white murals. 

The movie is more profound than it seem.  On the surface, the documentary is an avuncular study of rural France equipped with a quirky, highly intelligent narration and featuring whimsical encounters with eccentric men and women.  But it has a tone of sadness that grows more pronounced as the movie proceeds.  The film is also a mediation about seeing and being seen, the gaze and images that replicate or direct the gaze.  Varda and JR put images of miners on old brick miners' cottages in a pit town in northern France:  a miner's daughter, who will not move away from the crumbling cottages where she was born, shows a complex mixture of sorrow and joy when she sees her image, tall as a church on the side of her house.  Next we see a farmer -- his image gets plastered on his barn.  There is an interlude in a chemical factory where groups of workers are documented by huge images posted in the workplace -- for a good measure, Varda and JR decorate a water tower at the acid factory with whale-sized herrings and flounders.  The film shows us a couple of operations where goat cheese is produced -- one of them industrial and the other artisanal.  (This is a debate about whether to cauterize the horns off goats.)  A ghost town is decorated and Varda interviews a sort of aging hippie who lives in an eccentric grotto overlooking the village, concrete arches and tunnels all decorated with bottle-caps.  At Le Havre, the wives of dock workers are turned into sixty-foot tall totems plastered on the sides of stacked storage containers -- the women themselves sit inside the containers like the beating hearts of the colossi, or they flap their wings as if to fly. The mood darkens a little at the grave of Henri Cartier Bresson -- it's a tiny cemetery, a very wild and unkempt place.  JR asks Varda if she is afraid of death -- "No," she says.  In fact, she welcomes death.  "Why?" he questions.  "Because that'll be that," Agnes Varda says.  She's a tiny figure with bangs and a dome of hair that is white at the top and henna red around the edges.  On a beach where a German bunker built in World War Two has toppled from the chalk cliffs down into the tidal basin, Varda and JR plaster a huge image of a young man that she knew in the 50's, someone now long dead onto the fallen monument -- the young man's image covers the whole rough side of the bunker tilted up like a  pointed and monumental pyramid and half-sunk in the sand.  The next day the tide, which rises 2.6 meters on this beach has eroded away the picture -- the bunker looks like it did before the poster was glued to it.  Agnes and JR sit in folding chairs on the beach in a cold, wet wind that erases their footprints in the sand and blasts the camera. We learn that Varda is losing her eyesight and can barely see at all.  The images that she and JR strew about the landscape are art-works that she can't really appreciate any more -- they are just monochrome blurs to her.  A disturbing close-up of a needle being pressed into her open eye is intercut with the famous shot in Un Chien Andalou of an eye being slit by the razor blade.  "Compared to that razor-blade in Andalusian Dog, an injection is easy," Varda says. 

Of course, we know that Varda embodies the great age of French cinema between 1958 and May 1968, the New Wave -- with Godard, she is one of the last of directors that changed the history of cinema in that decade.  She pleads with JR, who is twice her size and who always wear a felt hat like Beuys above hisdark glasses to show her his eyes.  To encourage him, she screens a little film she made for Godard showing the great director as a young man with his radiant movie star wife, Anna Karenina.  Godard takes off his trademark sunglasses and shows us his eyes which are surprisingly large and soft-looking, the eyes of a Baroque saint or a cow-eyed Virgin Mary.  JR refuses.  She and the young man go to Godard's house but it's locked up and the great man declines to grant them an interview -- instead, he has written on his window a few gnomic phrases which refers to an afternoon forty years ago with Varda and her husband Jacques Demy (also a great director), Godard and his mistress.  Varda is hurt and angry and calls Godard a rat.  She starts crying.  JR says:  "Maybe he was just trying to render our movie more problematic."  "No, no," Varda says.  "He's a rat."  JR and the old woman sit on the edge of Lake Geneva and the young finally takes off his black-tinted sunglasses to show her his eyes.  We see him remove the glasses from with camera shooting over his shoulder, an image that is a homage to Godard by revealing everything but what we want to see.  Then, we are shown her point of view image of JR's face.  Her eyes can't focus any more and we see JR's face badly blurred, with black incommunicative eye-sockets, the empty dark eye-sockets of a skeleton.  JR says that he had never recognized that her eyes were so light colored.  And so the film ends with a close-up of the old woman's face.