A weathered utility van, painted to resemble an oversized box camera and housing both a passport photo booth and a large-format printing workshop, ambles down the rural backroads of France. Behind the wheel and in the passenger seat sit two unlikely collaborators: the 88-year-old French New Wave luminary Agnès Varda and the 33-year-old street artist JR. Transcending the standard conventions of documentary, their 2017 collaboration Faces Places (Visages Villages) unfolds as an intimate chronicle of two disparate generations learning how to look, listen, and see together.
Monumentalising the Everyday
JR’s methodology is rooted in direct, tactile engagement with public space and everyday citizens: photographing those typically rendered invisible, printing their portraits on an architectural scale, and pasting them across residential walls, grain silos, and industrial façades. For Varda, documentation is an existential imperative—a quiet conviction that any unrecorded face risks being lost to the dark recesses of memory. At the intersection of these two distinct impulses, the film taps into the daily lives of village bakers, mining communities, factory workers, and dockers. When towering portraits blown up from archival prints are pasted across brick and masonry, an entire neighbourhood is brought face-to-face with the sheer scale of its own neglected history.
A Memory Left to the Tides
One of the film’s most poignant sequences unfolds along the Normandy coast. On the exposed concrete flank of a fallen World War II German bunker resting half-submerged in the sand, Varda decides to paste a portrait of her late friend, the fashion photographer Guy Bourdin, taken in 1960. Despite JR’s practical apprehensions regarding the tides, the image is successfully affixed to the brutalist monolith. By the next morning, the encroaching sea has erased it entirely. The impermanence of the artistic gesture and an enduring loyalty to the dead merge during that brief intertidal moment, resolving into a quiet elegy.
Dark Sunglasses, a Sprint Through the Louvre, and Godard
JR’s refusal to remove his signature dark sunglasses functions as a recurring visual phantom for Varda, invoking her old New Wave contemporary, Jean-Luc Godard. In a joyous sequence, we watch JR push Varda in a wheelchair at breakneck speed through the galleries of the Louvre—a mischievous reenactment of the legendary sprint from Godard’s Bande à part. Toward the film’s conclusion, their journey to visit Godard at his home in Rolle, Switzerland, and the unexpected rejection awaiting them at his locked door forms the documentary’s rawest, most unvarnished emotional threshold.
An Unwavering Gaze and a Farewell
Though advanced age had begun to cloud Varda’s vision, her perspective on life gains remarkable clarity through the playful, deeply affectionate bond forged with JR. Transforming what might have been a generational chasm into an open ground of mutual artistic deference, their partnership earned the L’Œil d’or (Golden Eye) for Best Documentary at Cannes and established Varda as the oldest competitive nominee in Academy Award history.
Following her passing in 2019, Faces Places remains a timeless valedictory work—a lucid testament to how art, once liberated from pristine museum galleries, can find enduring life across the cracked plaster of a village wall or the corrugated steel of a shipping container.
