Moving pictures

Faces Places rather charmingly eludes easy categorization, and does so in a way that’s both casual and frolicsome, but never evasive, let alone willfully obscure.

In the simplest and most reductive and practical terms, it’s a documentary. But it’s also an Agnès Varda film, the latest in her string of poetically eccentric and offhandedly personal documentaries (The Gleaners and I, The Beaches of Agnes, etc.). Plus, this one is also a collaboration with the radical street artist JR, with whom she here shares directorial and authorial credit.

Varda, still a flourishing artist in her 80s, is sometimes referred to as the godmother of the French New Wave, and she and Jean-Luc Godard, who also figures crucially in Faces Places, are the last surviving and still-active greats of the movement. JR, still in his early 30s, has meanwhile achieved great renown in Europe and elsewhere, as a roving artist, a photographer who makes huge photo images of people and scenes he encounters in his travels, and then has them mounted on buildings and other structures in the settings he finds.

In Faces Places, Varda and JR travel to the north of France and elsewhere in a van that has a huge photographic image of a camera covering its right side. The van also contains a photo booth complete with the apparatus for producing large-format prints on the spot. The photos produced and the people encountered are key parts of the film’s amiably nonchalant storytelling.

Bits and pieces of Varda’s own life story become parts of the film’s rambling, multifaceted travel tale, and the collaboration with JR leads to an intertwining of two separate lives and selves, of past and future, of youth and age, in the present tense course of time, in the little miracles of miscellaneous motion and discovery.

JR and Varda emerge as distinctive characters in their own right, via their interactions in the course of their collaboration, but also through their interaction with the sights that they and the people they encounter and photograph.

There’s the farmer who works 2,000 acres by himself, with help from some old-school resolve and state-of-the-art technology. There’s Janine, the last resident of an old neighborhood slated for demolition. There’s the dockworker in Le Havre who stops work just long enough to register full appreciation of the project that Varda and JR have undertaken. In Faces Places, they all count for something special.