Agnes Varda

There's liking a movie for art reasons and there's liking a movie just because it's a movie, and then there's Agnes Varda who makes movies that are both art and extremely likable.

Agnes Varda says she's 89. I have to believe her, having seen most of her films and knowing she's of the great generation of 60's French filmmakers (Trauffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Resnais), but her age is no match for her seemingly inexhaustible energies. She has a new movie--Faces Places--in which she both acts and directs; it's too good a movie not to see, a paean to the past and a love letter to the future.

I won't give up the plot of Agnes' new movie, since there isn't really one. Faces Places is an art movie and art movies almost never have plots. She travels around France with a young art associate, taking pictures of ordinary people and pasting their images on the sides of their homes, on a water tower, a barn, shipping containers, making heroes of them. That's the plot, I suppose. The plot's also her love of France, of photography, of art itself.

After seeing Agnes' new movie last night, I had the thought once again that it's art that offers us the best kind of hope, and that hope is our new way of playing around, of making ourselves likable to one another.