7.8 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Director Agnès Varda and photographer and muralist JR journey through rural France and form an unlikely friendship.
Starring: Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, JRForeign | 100% |
Documentary | 25% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
French: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
English
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
This has been a really interesting spring in terms of my review queue and the recently passed awards season. I have either reviewed or am about to review a number of high profile Academy Award nominees and winners, including The Shape of Water, The Post, Lady Bird, I, Tonya, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Greatest Showman. But sprinkled in amongst these “marquee titles” have been a couple of other, putatively “smaller”, films which really offer viewers something unusual and, while manifestly different in each case, quite beautiful. Coco was the foregone conclusive winner of the Best Animated Film Academy Award this year, but I still believe the trophy really should have gone to Loving Vincent, which received an Academy Award nomination in the category and which I personally found to be a really staggering technical achievement (every frame in the film is an oil painting). I frankly hadn’t paid much attention to the Best Documentary Feature category of the Oscars aside from some passing knowledge of ultimate winner Icarus (a film about Russian doping), though during the recent Academy Awards broadcast I immediately recognized Faces Places as a title coming up in my queue when it was announced among the nominees. I’d now add it to Loving Vincent as one of those truly unexpected pleasures that sometimes show up. It’s an ostensibly slight documentary that nonetheless has some surprisingly deep emotions and maybe even a profound thought or two to offer.
Faces Places is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Media Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (mostly) in 1.85:1 (a few archival clips and montages of photos are in somewhat narrower aspect ratios). Aside from what to my eyes looked like a bit too much brightness, something that tends to cast a kind of milky haze over scenes make blacks veer toward grays, this is a very sharp and well detailed looking presentation. The scenes of the gorgeous French countryside offer sometimes spectacular depth of field, and the many close-ups of Varda, JR and their photographic subjects typically offer excellent fine detail levels. Aside from the aforementioned milkiness, the palette looks rather warm and inviting, with nice saturation and overall accuracy. There are no issues with compression anomalies.
Faces Places features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix in the original French which frankly may be a bit of overkill, since there really aren't any huge opportunities in this smaller scale feature for "wow" sonics. Instead, there's typical immersive qualities provided by Mathieu Chedid's lilting score, or in some of the ubiquitous outdoor material, where ambient environmental sounds can dot the surround channels. But in essence this is really a "two hander", consisting largely of interactions between Varda and JR, and as such there simply isn't a ton of surround activity. That said, fidelity is fine throughout the presentation, and there are no problems of any kind to report.
Faces Places may seem, kind of like a photograph itself, to be only surface deep, but there are some profundities here nonetheless, both in terms of the sweet "May - December" relationship between JR and Varda, but also with regard to the many people with whom this pair come into contact as they roam the countryside looking for subjects. Varda cheekily opines at one point that chance has always been the best assistant to his career, and in that spirit, I'd recommend taking a chance on this charming documentary. Highly recommended.
1982
Les plages d'Agnès
2008
L'univers de Jacques Demy
1995
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse... deux ans après
2002
Agnès Varda: From Here to There
2011
1976
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse
2000
Ydessa, the Bears and etc.
2004
1964
Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe / Women Reply: Our Bodies, Our Sex
1975
1958
Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans
1993
The So-Called Caryatids
1984
1966
Varda par Agnès
2019
Along the Coast
1958
2015
You've Got Beautiful Stairs, You Know
1986
1984
Mural Murals
1981