Faces Places (original title Visages, Villages) is the last of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature I had to see – I’ve also caught two of the Documentary Short nominees – and I could see an argument that it’s the best. It’s certainly unique among the nominees in that it’s not really about anything at all; the other four all tell stories, often with an eye on exposing or explaining something, but Faces Places is a slice of life in the truest sense of the phrase. It seems like the sort of thing you could never sell until you’d made it and could show a distributor what the finished product is, because the magic here is in the way the two leads interact on screen throughout the movie. You can buy it on Amazon or iTunes.
Agnes Varda is an 89-year-old grande dame of French cinema, a major figure in the New Wave of the 1950s, a friend of Godard, married to Jacques Demy for over 30 years. She and a photographer-artist named JR are the stars of the film, driving around villages in France, visiting friends or acquaintances, taking photos and blowing them up to paste on the sides of buildings, water towers, and train cars. Their interactions with each other – it’s such an unlikely friendship, but the affection is so obviously genuine that it’s truly moving – and with the various locals are the heart of the film. Some of the best moments are the reactions of the people whose photographs JR and Varda take and blow up, how they respond to seeing themselves portrayed in these giant posters. One becomes a mini-celebrity and finds she doesn’t like how people recognize her now as the woman on the side of the building. The wives of three workers at a port end up with their portraits on giant stacks of shipping containers (Frank Sobotka declined comment) and then sit inside their own images in the film’s most memorable shot. One describes feeling large and powerful; another hates feeling enclosed and so far off the ground. It’s peculiar to see how making someone two-dimensional brings out something different in their humanity, but that seems to be the trick of Varda & JR’s technique.
Varda is really the star of the film, though, and that was evident to me even though I was totally unfamiliar with her work or reputation before seeing this. Part of the connection probably came from how she reminded me of my maternal grandmother, who, like Varda, was short (I doubt my grandmother ever saw five feet, and was probably closer to 4’8” when she died at 100), had a raspy voice (she smoked for 75+ years), and kept her hair very short. Seeing Varda lean into JR – who seems pretty tall, although standing next to her makes him look like a giant – reminded me so much of how my grandmother would do the same with me once I was an adult, especially comforting her during moments of melancholy near the end of her life, that I felt an immediate empathy with the director from the movie’s start. When she does have a real moment of deep sadness near the end, the one thing that really happens in the movie, it got to me even though her grief in that scene was intensely personal to her.
Varda became the oldest person to receive an Oscar nomination in any non-honorary category with this year’s nod, and between that and her importance in the industry, Faces Places might be the sentimental favorite, if not the overall favorite, to win for Best Documentary Feature. (The nomination also led to an amusing scene when Varda declined to fly from France to Los Angeles for the nominees’ luncheon, so JR brought a few cardboard cutouts of Varda in her stead, and 2D Varda was a big hit.) Last Men in Aleppo is probably the best of the five for the importance of its subject matter, although I was surprised at how distant I felt from the tragedies on screen in that film. Icarus was the most gripping to watch, because it’s so incredibly bizarre how that filmmaker stumbled on the biggest doping scandal in sports history while trying to make a documentary about something else. If I had a ballot, which I don’t because the Academy just won’t return my calls, I’d probably vote for Icarus, but inside I’d hope Faces Places won anyway … even if cardboard Agnes is the one accepting the award.
* Four of the five nominees for Best Documentary Short are available to stream right now, and I’ve seen two, with a third downloaded to watch today or tomorrow. Knife Skills tells the story of Edwin’s, a Cleveland restaurant that hires people who’ve just been released from prison, training them over a period of several months, while serving classical French cuisine and earning rave reviews. The documentary follows the restaurant’s inaugural class of 120, which ends up whittled by more than half before the restaurant has been open three months, focusing on a few individual student-employees, mostly imprisoned for drug-related offenses, who will surprise you with how quickly they seem to take to and enjoy this grueling work. It’s also on iTunes and amazon.
Traffic Stop is on HBO’s streaming apps, and holy shit, is this a bad look for the Austin Police Department. A white cop pulls a black woman out of her car for speeding, throws her to the ground, beats her, threatens to tase her, and then tells the next officer to arrive that she resisted arrest … but it was all caught on his dash cam. Not only was he not fired for the incident, his superiors didn’t hear about it for over a year, by which point it was too late for them to suspend or fire him; he was just terminated a month ago for standing on a suspect’s head during another arrest. The documentary intersperses all of the dash cam footage with shots of the victim, Breaion King, talking about what it did to her life, and just about herself – she’s a math teacher who has worked in the community and has no criminal history whatsoever, but was targeted because she was black. The big reveal, though, is when a different cop, one who seems to be sympathetic to her, says that the problem is that black people have “violent tendencies” that lead white cops to assume the worst. I see no evidence anywhere that that officer has been disciplined in any way, and can only assume that he’s still out there, representing Austin’s finest.