Faces Places

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

The pair 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 mark 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 is what holds the film together. A pilgrimage to an old friend runs through the journey and gives it an undertow of feeling.

Critics embraced it as a warm, moving capstone to one of cinema's great careers, and Varda received an honorary Academy Award 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. Few late films sum up a career so gracefully, and this one gathers in nearly everything her seven decades of work stood for, from the curiosity about strangers to the pleasure in a well-made image.