Most moviegoers will know French artist JR from his stirring collaboration with Agnès Varda, “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated 2017 documentary that revealed a friendship steeped in artistic fellowship about the hidden majesty in people whose lives often go unnoticed. Varda’s recognizable haircut and compact size and JR’s spry hat-and-sunglasses anonymity made for a charmingly odd pairing as they bantered and interviewed various laborers across France whose faces became breathtaking murals.
The technique they used is JR’s bread and butter — photographs blown to building-sized proportions, then pasted in public — but “Faces” very much felt led by Varda, with her thirty-something companion as an energetic sidekick.