Tuesday night - "Faces Places" a movie by JR and Agnès Varda was shown at the Filmhuis in The Hague.

A.O. Scott wrote two years ago in The Times:

'The film works just fine as an anthology of amiable encounters and improvised collaborations.
But it’s a lot more than that. Despite its unassuming, conversational ethos — which is also to say by means of Ms. Varda’s staunchly democratic understanding of her job as a filmmaker — “Faces Places” reveals itself as a powerful, complex and radical work. Ms. Varda’s modesty is evidence of her mastery, just as her playful demeanor is the expression of a serious and demanding aesthetic commitment. Almost by stealth, but also with cheerful forthrightness, she communicates a rich and challenging array of feelings and ideas. As we contemplate those faces and places we are invited to reflect on the passage of time and the nature of memory, on the mutability of friendship and the durability of art, on the dignity of labor and the fate of the European working class.

Ms. Varda and JR visit a town in France’s northern coal-producing region where the mines have shut down. They call on a prosperous farmer, on factory workers and retirees, on a group of longshoremen and their wives. Without pressing a political agenda or bringing up matters of ideology or identity, they evoke a history of proud struggle and bitter defeat, a chronicle etched in the stones of the villages and the lines on the faces.

Beneath the jauntiness and good humor there is an unmistakably elegiac undertone to this film, an implicit acknowledgment of lateness and loss. The places will crumble and the faces will fade, and the commemorative power of the images that JR and Ms. Varda make will provide a small and partial compensation for this gloomy inevitability. The world and its inhabitants are protean and surprising, but also almost unbearably fragile, and you feel the pull of gravity even in the film’s most lighthearted passages.

Ms. Varda, steeped in the traditions of the avant-garde, is resistant to nostalgia — there’s always too much to notice here and now — but she finds herself drawn to retrospection. Her glance turns backward, to her own earlier work and to her relationships with colleagues and friends. She tells JR that he reminds her of Jean-Luc Godard, her erstwhile comrade in the heady, heroic days of the French new wave. Mr. Godard in his 30s favored dark glasses and an impish, enigmatic air, and he plays an intriguing off-camera role in “Faces Places.”'

Read the article here.

Mr. Godard does play an intriguing role in this film indeed.

And there is despite Ms. Varda a glibness in the artwork of JR that's sometimes feels as uncomfortable as the role of the almost absent Mr. Godard.

If you as an artist - whatever we mean by 'artist' - want to make other people visible you could also ask yourself, what do we see? "Lateness and loss", but mainly other people's lateness and loss. The real thing, but not really the real thing.
The big question looming over this film is: why did Ms, Varda need JR to make it? Or was he just a companion? Whatever he was to her, "Faces Places" is another Varda movie worth watching.