A matter of life and death | 20 September 2018

Faces Places is a documentary directed by Agnès Varda in collaboration with JR, the famous Parisian photographer and muralist (although, if you’re as shallow as I am, your first thought may also have been: how is this possible now that Larry Hagman is dead?). The pair visit small towns in France, meeting ordinary people, taking their photograph, blowing the photographs up huge, and pasting them outdoors on buildings and barns and trains. It sounds arty-farty, and I suppose it is, but it is also a mesmerising meditation on lives lived, friendship, ageing and mortality. Plus it throws in this fact for good measure: Jean-Luc Godard can be a total bastard. I didn’t see that coming, I must say.

Varda is commonly described as ‘the godmother of the French New Wave’, which may be something of an insult, as she always played such an integral part. Her 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7 remains as fresh and riveting as ever — but the fellas have hogged the limelight. (The late, great film critic Roger Ebert said that the reason she is not routinely included along with Godard and Truffaut and Rohmer et al. is plainly ‘because she’s a woman’.) She is now 90, and a decade ago she made an autobiographical film, The Beaches of Agnès, in which she described herself as ‘a little old lady, pleasantly plump’. That still holds true, except that she now has fascinating hair: a pageboy that’s white on top and dark red below. In some shots, she looks like a scuttling mushroom.