JR and Agnès Varda have a blast with people and animals in the masterful Faces and Places
FACES PLACES (VISAGES VILLAGES) (Agnès Varda & JR, 2017)
New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center
Sunday, October 1, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 12:30
Monday, October 2, Francesca Beale Theater, $25, 8:30
Festival runs September 28 – October 14
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www.filmlinc.org
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“We’ll have fun making a film,” legendary eighty-eight-year-old Belgian-born French auteur Agnès Varda tells thirty-three-year-old French photographer and street artist JR in Faces Places (Visages Villages), a masterful road movie that may very well be the most fun film you’ll see all year. The unlikely pair first met when Varda, who has made such classics as Cléo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Gleaners and I, accepted an invitation from JR, whose practice involves wheat-pasting giant black-and-white photos of men, women, and children on architectural structures, to visit his Paris studio. (JR brought his “Inside Out” art project to Times Square in 2013.) When Varda saw JR’s blow-up of a 1960 self-portrait Varda shot of herself standing in front of a Bellini painting in Venice, the two instantly hit it off and decided to make a film together, heading out in JR’s small photo-booth truck to team up with people in small towns throughout France, including coal miners, dockworkers, farmers, a church-bell ringer, and factory workers. The reactions of the villagers — shrewd, curious, flattered — to JR’s enormous wheat-pasted blow-ups of themselves on their neighborhood walls, barns, abandoned housing, containers, water towers, and other locations are fascinating. “JR is fulfilling my greatest desire. To meet new faces and photograph them, so they don’t fall down the holes of my memory,” Varda, who edited the film with Maxime Pozzi-Garcia, says. Varda and JR make a formidable duo, finding a childlike innocence in their collaboration that is simply captivating to watch.
Cinematic collaboration between Agnès Varda and JR results in stunning visions of humanity
Varda continually tries to get JR to remove his ever-present dark glasses, remembering how her friend and colleague Jean-Luc Godard once let her take pictures of him without glasses, but JR prefers to maintain his mystery, a man who photographs tens of thousands of people’s faces around the world while never fully showing his own. Varda, who relies on the “power of imagination,” even sets up an afternoon with Godard at his home in Switzerland, preparing by having JR roll her furiously through the same Louvre galleries the protagonists run through in Godard’s Band of Outsiders, but of course nothing with Godard ever goes quite as planned. “Chance has always been my best asset,” Varda proclaims in the film, and it is chance, and the willingness to enthusiastically embrace every moment of life, that helps give Faces Places its immeasurable charm. The film, which features a playful score by Matthieu Chedid (‑M-) and was executive produced by Varda’s daughter, Rosalie Varda-Demy, subtly tackles socioeconomic issues but is primarily a marvelous celebration of genuine humanity. Faces Places is screening at the New York Film Festival on October 1 at Alice Tully Hall and October 2 at the Francesca Beale Theater, with both shows followed by a Q&A with Varda and JR.
Master cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who has shot such beautiful films as Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love and Ashes of Time, Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe, and Zhang Yimou’s Hero, once again displays his unique visual flair in Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled, Preoccupied, Preposterous, the third full-length work he has directed, after 1999’s Away with Words and 2008’s Izolator. The documentary, which he also photographed and contains some confusing fiction elements, is divided into three sections that examine the hopes and dreams of three generations of people living in Hong Kong, the Australia-born Doyle’s adopted hometown. The majority of the film, which was helped by a Kickstarter campaign that raised $125,000, features long shots of people, streets, buildings, and the waterfront in Hong Kong, with voice-over narration from the men, women, and children shown onscreen, who were interviewed separately. But the film suffers drastically whenever Doyle turns away from that method and has live dialogue and interaction, breaking the engaging premise he begins with. In the first section, “Preschooled,” we meet Pet Shop Boy, who chills with flamingos in a zoo; Ching Man, aka Red Cap Girl, who passes out religious pamphlets about multiple gods of numerous religions while refusing to be tempted by the Devil; Teacher Selene, who is getting tired of waiting around for Beat Box; Vodka Wong, who gets bullied until he fights back and appears to prefer his maid, Yan Yan, to his mother; and Egg Tart Angel, who hands out free egg custard tarts to anyone who looks sad and lonely.
Jeremy Kagan’s Shot is a profound film about gun violence in America, seen through the eyes of both the victim and the shooter of a horrific event. Noah Wyle stars as Mark Newman, a Hollywood sound mixer who is working on punching up a scene in a Western involving a shootout. Later that day he goes to meet his estranged wife, Phoebe (Sharon Leal), for lunch during which she asks him to sign divorce papers. When they leave the restaurant, they are talking on the street when Newman gets hit in the chest by a stray bullet accidentally fired by Miguel (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), a teen who was thinking about getting a gun from his cousin because he was being bullied at school. Most of the film occurs in real time as police officers Anderson (Brad Lee Wind) and Ramirez (Maria Russell) respond at the scene and EMTs Jones (Malcolm-Jamal Warner), Garcia (Dominic Colon), and Turner (Tommy Day Carey) rush Newman to the hospital, where nurses Gina (Eve Kagan), Samantha (Joy Osmanski), and Marci (Elaine Hendrix) and Dr. Roberts (Xander Berkeley) try to save his life as Phoebe looks on. Meanwhile, Miguel, who is not a bad kid, tries to figure out what to do next as he is on the run through the Echo Park section of Los Angeles, terrified by what he did and what the consequences might be. Producer-director Kagan (The Chosen, The Journey of Natty Gann) and editor Norman Hollyn tell both parts of the story at the same time using split screens as cinematographer Jacek Laskus puts the viewer right in the middle of the action, occasionally shooting from Newman’s point of view as he wonders if he will live and, if so, will ever be able to walk again.
Winner of both the Palme d’Or and the Critics Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas is a stirring and provocative road movie about the dissolution of the American family and the death of the American dream. Written by Sam Shepard and adapted by L. M. Kit Carson, the two-and-a-half-hour film opens with a haggard man (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering through a vast, deserted landscape. A close-up of him in his red hat, seen against blue skies and white clouds, evokes the American flag. (Later shots show him looking up at a flag flapping in the breeze, as well as a graffiti depiction of the Statue of Liberty.) After he collapses in a bar in the middle of nowhere, he is soon discovered to be Travis Henderson, a husband and father who has been missing for four years. His brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), a successful L.A. billboard designer, comes to take him home, but Travis, remaining silent, keeps walking away. He eventually reveals that he is trying to get to Paris, Texas, where he has purchased a plot of land in the desert, but he avoids discussing his past and why he walked out on his wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and son, Hunter (Hunter Carson, the son of L. M. Kit Carson and Karen Black), who is being raised by Walt and his wife, Anne (Aurore Clément). An odd man who is afraid of flying, has a penchant for arranging shoes, and falls asleep at key moments, Travis sets out with Hunter to find Jane and make something out of his lost life.
