Visages Villages
A heartwarming and moving road movie in which Agnès Varda and photographer JR, who is more than fifty years her junior, travel to small French villages in a van to photograph the local population.
Agnès Varda made films alive with curiosity and playfulness. Even in her eighties she was the world’s most youthful filmmaker. Her last film is an inspired collaboration with JR, the mysterious French street artist. Like many of Varda’s works, Visages Villages is a kind of travelogue in which the wonder of each locale visited is only as potent as the populace whose existence affects it.
The modus operandi is simple: Varda and JR roam from place to place in JR’s truck, which is decorated to resemble a camera. In each place they visit, they meet people – coal miners, cheese makers, a Herculean farmer – and JR creates immense monochromatic portraits of them. Our endearing duo then affixes these portraits to various edifices.
Visages Villages won the award for best documentary in Cannes and the audience award in Toronto. The disarming film turned out to be Agnès Varda’s swan song: the filmmaker passed away in 2019. The awareness of the approaching end therefore hangs like a melancholic haze over this extraordinary journey.