Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Faces Places Blu-ray Movie Review

The old woman of Rochefort?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 8, 2018

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.

While the reviews aren’t live yet (they hopefully will be soon), I’ve been wending my way through what I might jokingly call some of the “vaguest” films in Nouvelle Vague, contained in Jean-Luc Godard + Jean-Pierre Gorin: Five Films, 1968-1971. There’s an almost photographic stylistic conceit on display in several of these films, to the point that some of them have moments that are almost like still life works. Perhaps saliently, then, Faces Places co-creator Agnès Varda has career connections both to photography and the French New Wave. Her collaborator in Faces Places is JR, who might be thought of as Banksy with a camera. JR has a mobile photography shop in a van that can spit out huge, oversized mural size photos that he then pastes to the sides of buildings. Faces Places documents not just Varda and JR’s developing relationship, but a kind of “road trip” they take to various places, where they interact with the natives and memorialize their visit with huge photographs plastered over facades.

Now it might seem that a documentary built around two people driving around and taking pictures of various folks and then gluing them to the sides of buildings may not have that much to offer, but Faces Places proves to be surprisingly engaging for almost its entire running time. There are certain elisions that are made, including how Varga and JR met, and there’s an actually kind of curious lack of background information on both of them, though there are at least a couple of “detours” briefly documenting Varga’s past with such luminaries as the aforementioned Jean-Luc Godard. (There’s actually a charming little vignette where Varga attempts to get JR to remove his ubiquitous sunglasses so that she can photograph him, which he refuses to do, which leads to a wonderful little moment showing old photos of Godard that Varga took where she got him to remove his (then) ubiquitous sunglasses.)

If the combined pasts of Varga and JR aren’t really the purview of this piece (either by design or simply because their histories aren't really dealt with in any meaningful way), their developing relationship, which is really quite unbelievably sweet and occasionally a little contentious, animates the film agreeably throughout. But the real emotional content here is with regard to various people with whom they come into contact. Some of these vignettes are a little underdeveloped, as in the case of a woman who poses with a parasol and then becomes something of a celebrity in a little village when Varga and JR paste her immense photo to the side of an ancient building. (Even this event seems to suggest that Varga and JR revisited some locations after their original photo snapping time.) But other moments, like the duo’s travels to an old mining community, are surprisingly heartfelt, unearthing (no pun intended) all sorts of interesting information about what life was like for the rural French as recently as a few decades ago, and how some of these villages are now in essence ghost towns.

There’s a ghost of a different kind that shows up late in the film, and it’s particularly relevant to the fact that Faces Places tends to leave the focal pair’s history largely uncontextualized. Jean-Luc Godard arrives as a “character” of sorts toward the end of the film, as both Varda and JR decide to make a pilgrimmage to him. There’s some kind of unspoken history here, and I really wish the film had spent a little bit more time getting into this aspect, as there’s a rather odd denouement to everything that suggests Varda harbors some resentments (Godard not only was a friend of Varda’s, but perhaps even more so with Varda’s late husband, the great Jacques Demy).

Faces Places Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Chance is the Best Assistant: Agnes Varda and JR on Faces Places (1080p; 46:39) is a charming joint interview with the pair, where they discuss their relationship and the film.


• Letters (1080p; 3:29) is a short featuring people holding letters in lieu of having their faces plastered on the sides of buildings.


• Cabin (1080p; 3:54) looks like an outtake from the film, with Varda and JR discussing potential applications to a seaside cabin.


• Music (1080p; 3:33) documents a project Varda came up with that involves composer Mathieu Chedid, who scored Faces Places.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:20)

Faces Places Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.