Faces Places

One of the final works of the French New Wave pioneer Agnès Varda, Faces Places (2017) was co-directed with the muralist JR and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary — making the eighty-nine-year-old Varda the oldest person ever nominated in a competitive category. It won the Golden Eye documentary prize at Cannes.

The film follows the pair as they tour the French countryside in JR's van, photographing farmers, dockers, miners' widows and waiters, then enlarging the images into monumental paste-ups on the sides of buildings. Varda's playful, humane curiosity — the hallmark of a career stretching back to Cléo from 5 to 7 — meets JR's grand public-art gestures, and their banter about age, memory and seeing becomes the film's quiet heart. A pilgrimage to an old friend gives it an unexpected ache.

Critics embraced it as a warm, moving capstone to one of cinema's great careers, and Varda would receive an honorary Oscar soon after. Generous, witty and gently elegiac, Faces Places distils her lifelong belief in the dignity of ordinary faces, and in the camera as an instrument of attention and love. It is a perfect late grace note from a singular artist. Varda would receive an honorary Academy Award soon after, and the film's tender curiosity about ordinary faces serves as a moving distillation of everything her seven-decade career stood for.