Recencies van critici

A wonderful exercise in memory and merriment, in instinct and improvisation.

A picture of [Varda's] friend, the photographer Guy Bourdin (1928-91), she had taken in 1954, is glued by JR’s assistants on the side of a WWII blockhouse incongruously fallen on the beach from a cliff. Bourdin’s image is placed in such a way that he seems to be “rocking” at the bottom of the blockhouse. “When you think of the dead, you want to cradle them,” says Varda.

Like the worst social-practice art—the innumerable critiques of which seem not to have reached Varda and JR—these ameliorative excursions seek to inject creativity and happiness into the lives of those less fortunate.

Although Varda and JR's banter sometimes edges the feminist icon further into meme-friendly, funky grandma territory, they also offer some real insights into what it's like to be old. Her frank discussions about how she had to rest between shooting days—and how that was unappealing to potential investors—proves that the world isn't ready for truly slow cinema.

The 89-year-old filmmaker's odd-couple pairing with the 34-year-old photographer points to [Varda's] continued investment in the joyful possibilities (and painful limitations) of working with another. Both are on display in Faces Places' stirring closing scenes, with the callous absence of Varda's storied cinematic colleague leading to the revelation of the film's final face—an act of self-disclosure that Varda treats with the sensitivity of an artist and the tenderness of a friend.

I love this sportive, altogether magical film—it's light and simple and funny, and all the more profound for it. FACES PLACES is a buddy/road trip comedy about a deepening cross-generational friendship; it's also an insightful documentary, a mutual portrait of two unique artists whose visions harmonize.

People used to use the term "second childhood" for a certain, declining phase of old age, but Varda has, for years, been giving that term a meaning of her own... [Varda and JR] demonstrate that artists can be serious about the world and about intervening in it, but they don't necessarily have to be "solitary philosophers." As this breezy, politically and humanistically generous film shows, they can be gregarious playmates too.

From the opening-credit animation onward, this delightful, digressive, breezy collaboration, staged to look more spontaneous than it possibly could be, celebrates and enhances both artists, repeatedly finding the extraordinary in the ordinary and growing more reflective and melancholy only in its Swiss epilogue. For Varda, this is a spinoff of sorts to The Gleaners and I(2000) and The Beaches of Agnès (2008); for me it was a welcome introduction to the work of JR.

The sense of loss that many of these subjects confront, the sense of resistance to unwelcome change that others display, makes "Faces Places" essentially elegiac, a snatching of vitality and consolation in a race against the ultimate loss and oblivion, death. Yet the movie remains warm, lighthearted, enthusiastic, even celebratory.

Agnes Varda is almost 90 years old and she is still making films. That alone should be cause for dancing in the streets. But wait, there's more: Agnes Varda is almost 90 years old and she is still making fantastic films. Searching, compassionate, provocative, funny, sad ones. This is one of them. You should see it, and then go dancing in the streets.

Unfolding as a series of thrift-shop-find vignettes, Faces Places has oodles of charm and moments of beauty, but lacks the essayistic point-of-view of Varda's best documentaries.

Varda, who ingeniously and matter-of-factly documents her own memory lapses using filmed sequences to replace the memory of incidents she has forgotten, is educating JR in transmitting and restoring memory. The movie bears witness to a profound and subtle change in his work, a change wrought not by will, but through their evolving relationship.