On the eve of her tenth decade, the marvellous Agnès Varda embarked on the enchanted journey that we see in Faces Places. For admirers of the great French director – of whom there are a great many: indeed, it is hard not to be won over by her resolutely independent, profoundly humanistic substance and style – its spirit will recall her two earlier documentary films of the century, The Gleaners & I (2000) and the more autobiographical The Beaches of Agnès (2008), though the mélange between personal and social is here complete. This is a journey that celebrates a life richly lived as well as the human interaction, the delight in the sheer richness of humanity, that has always been inseparable from that existence.
The difference from those previous films is that in Faces Places Varda does not travel alone, her companion here the vivacious photographer JR, a half century her junior: she has seen “88 springtimes”, he is 33. (Quite how they met is shrouded in a whimsical series of opening episodes charting how they didn't meet, including an irresistible disco scene with the veteran Varda gamely bopping the dance floor.) JR’s speciality is large-scale photo portraiture, created in the most democratic style possible: he drives a special photo-camion, designed to resemble a camera, complete with photo booth and equipment which produces, directly out of the side of the truck, huge prints for pasting on walls,. Or any other suitable surface, since his speciality (aided by a team of assistants) is plastering his images – which can be anything up to ten times human scale – on anything, from gasometers to train wagons. Portraits in landscape, as never before.
It’s their shared interest in their subjects – hardly the right word, when collaboration is so close – that makes this pairing ideal; these are not artists working on their own, but creators of events. “To meet new faces,” is how Varda expresses the resolve behind their road trip, its destinations better caught by the film’s French title, Visages Villages. No big city monotony here, rather an exploration of rural France, its singularities and personalities relished to the full.
Was there a guiding concept behind their journey, as they travel from the declining mining communities of the North to the villages of the South, where a sense of profound permanence seems to reign? Hard to say, when chance (“We enlist it as an assistant!”) so clearly played a role. In each location, JR and his team create small monuments to individuality, putting the sitters in a spotlight that nevertheless seems a natural part of their environment: they range from Jeanine, the last remaining resident in a whole row of miners’ dwellings (pictured above), through portraits of the wives of three Le Havre dockers that are emblazoned, almost 100 meters in height, across the sides of shipping containers, to the collectif of a Provence chemical factory (pictured below, with Varda and JR).
Change is a recurring motif, a level of dehumanisation noted in working life
That last detail brings home that the Varda-JR tandem does not consciously seek out any sort of rustic idyll; modernity is a natural element in these worlds, even if politics remains distant (notwithstanding any reflections we may have that some of the communities visited would surely have voted for Le Pen). And change is a recurring motif, a level of dehumanisation noted in working life: where once whole communities would have brought in the harvest, now a single farmer attends to 2,000 acres on his own, sitting atop a tractor/harvester that is fully controlled by computer.
“What is the subject, actually?” Varda muses at one point. For her, perhaps, it is in the conviction that whatever activity a human being may engage with, it should not dwarf the humanity of the individual(s) involved. Faces Places teaches us quite a lot on matters caprine, including that today’s goats often have their horns removed (burnt away, or “disbudded”, at an early age). That’s ostensibly to reduce damage when they fight, but Varda is affronted: how she rejoices when she finds a smallholder who resists all that, a place where milking by hand rather than machine is seen as the natural process. To treat someone or something as mere “product” is the worst thing of all.
By loose extension, art becomes a catalyst that can transform the everyday. Asked by one railwayman why JR has pasted images of Varda’s eyes (and toes, too) onto the sides of chemical-storage train tankers, she replies that it is to endorse the “power of imagination”. We may perhaps wonder whether there is nevertheless an elitist concept involved somewhere, in this conscious idea that “art is for everyone”, especially when promulgated by France’s generous funding regime. But Varda’s film brings home how that can never be the case when everyone is involved (the film’s crowdfunding element is surely as appropriate here as the concept has ever been).
Faces Places is also a picaresque story of bonding between two individuals, their symbiosis of engagement with those whom they encounter reinforced by the gentlest of teasing. Both look with such curiosity at the world around them, that issue of vision associated both with Agnès’s failing sight and JR’s reluctance to take off his dark glasses. That latter strand harks back naturally to Varda’s 1961 burlesque film-within-a-film, Méfiez-vous des lunettes noires (Beware of dark glasses), in which Jean-Luc Godard, no less, starred with a Keatonesque charm, a quality singularly lacking in his behaviour in the final scene of Faces Places. It proves a rare moment of sadness in a work where these two presences, perfectly accompanied by Matthieu Chedid’s string score, are so entrancingly life-affirming. If ever a film could promise you une bonne journée, it’s Faces Places.
Overleaf: watch the preview for Faces Places
That may sound like a perfect opportunity for some père-et-fils quality time between sixty-something Abu Shadi and his man-bunned son, Shadi (Mohammad Bakri and Saleh Bakri, father and son in real life, pictured above), but in reality the sturdy old Volvo they are driving sometimes appears more resilient than their relationship. Jacir’s beautifully observed script skilfully outlines their wider circumstances and family story, taking in both the very particular realities of their life as Palestinians in a particular environment, as well as the general hazards and frictions of family life that might be found anywhere in the world.
Wajib is a film anchored to its very depths in a particular territory, with Jacir giving us all the particular details of life of her chosen world – its everyday aspects but also a sense of its past, of roots that extend further back than any current politics. The director was born in Bethlehem and, after growing up in Saudi Arabia, education in New York, and some years based in Amman, has now returned to live there: we may wonder whether the profound humanism of her new film somehow reflects that relocation. It’s there in the film’s look, too: there’s little obvious beauty in the Nazareth locations, but they’re caught with real resonance, as well as poised framing by French cinematographer Antoine 
This version provides a prologue for Arkadina that find this vainglorious actress in her natural theatrical habitat, before the narrative of the play itself kicks in with the return to her brother Sorin's rural estate of Arkadina and her retinue, which includes the spineless if charismatic Trigorin. (In that crucial and difficult role, New York theatre regular Corey Stoll manages to be both imposing and weak, as required by the dictates of a plot that spans several years on the way to its tragic finish.) And whether revelling in the applause of her unseen audience or interrupting her son's play to proffer a deflating aspersion or two, Bening (pictured above) is in full command of the ever-mercurial Arkadina, a part this terrific actress should at some point revisit onstage; while we're at it, she'd be an excellent Ranevskaya, as well. 
A name-heavy cast (a pragmatic Jon Tenney here, a tearful Mare Winningham there) includes Elisabeth Moss (pictured right) in terrific form as the mordantly funny, black-clad Masha, trapped in a marriage that roils her to the soul, and Brian Dennehy as the ailing Sorin, who at least is allowed to expire in something resembling the natural order of events: a luxury not always available to the younger generation around him. Amongst that blighted lot, I expected rather more from Ronan's Nina, the self-described seagull of the title, who seems hampered by an American accent that never sounds as lived-in as the one this three-time Oscar nominee assumed so well for Lady Bird. That said, this Seagull compels and wounds as it must and ends with the requisite moment of hinted-at recognition as Arkadina and co get on with life, even as they exist forever to be shadowed by death. 
It’s an adaption of Emily Danforth’s 2012 coming-of-age novel that told the story of a 12-year-girl who, after the death of her parents in an accident, is adopted into the evangelical Christian family of her aunt. The film has taken the final third or so of the book, from Cameron’s developing relationship with schoolmate Coley – their passionate embraces are interspersed with watching films like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – through to their being discovered, by an accompanying “boyfriend” date, making out in the back of a car during the school Prom.
They’re all too aware that release back into the wider world will depend on the appearance of change rather than anything else. But their readiness to bide time in so laid-back a fashion doesn’t extend to all, however, as one searing late scene – with a stand-out role from Owen Campbell – reveals.
Flashback to 1999 in East Timor, where foreign correspondents were advised to quit a UN compound, when it was surrounded by murderous militiamen. Colvin refused to go and her presence deterred the attack long enough for the 1,000 refugees inside to be rescued. Afterwards she summed up what she learned from the experience: “I thought that journalism can make a difference. It is not in vain.” 
Shrapnel had also torn a hole the size of a fist in his thigh (pictured above: Conroy recaling his ordeal). He was taken to the medical centre and operated on with only cigarettes to dull the pain. The building, meanwhile, took 10 direct hits. Assad, it seems, was determined to finish them off. They put out an SOS on social media, which was answered by a ceasefire and the arrival of a Syrian Red Crescent ambulance (not the Red Cross that they were hoping for). And prompted by a whispered warning from the accompanying medic, they declined to leave in the regime’s vehicle. 
