In short: Faces Places (2017)

Original title: Visages Villages

Together with photographer JR (who is credited as co-director), Agnès Varda goes on a road trip through the French countryside to meet, interview, and photograph an assortment of (predominantly) women who don’t usually get the starring roles in anything. As part of JR’s modus operandi, and certainly fitting perfectly with Varda’s approach to people in her documentaries, the duo and their assistants then plaster giant photos of their subjects on walls (and others things). There are side trips and distractions, of course, for these two clearly find the world and the people populating it endlessly fascinating and interesting. Because this is a late period Varda movie, the encounters are presented with an emotional directness that always threatens to border on the twee but rarely if ever devolves into it.

Instead, all of this feels kind and human and genuine in all the right ways. Thus the film can also encompass themes like our heroine’s blurring eye sight, aging, and threatening mortality, JR’s fixation on wearing sunglasses probably even under the shower (and what it may mean – a Godard fixation?), an encounter with his grandmother who is basically glowing with love for her grandson, and a non-encounter with fucking Godard that leaves Varda in tears and provokes JR to show her the whole of her face in a moment that feels staged and genuine at the same time. This last bit only puts further fuel on the fire of my thesis that late period (really, post-60s) Godard and late period Varda are artistically antithetical in their documentaries – he consumed by concepts and words and so completely disinterested in people or the world we live in, he can’t conceive of things like kindness as anything but abstracts; she, finding something of interest and worth in the practical lives of everybody she meets, and going out into the world to share this even when she’s old, tired and half blind. If you think I’m making an implicit value judgement here, you’re absolutely right, for I am unfortunately not as kind as Varda in her late films (though I am trying).

In short: Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1983)

aka The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II

As the long-time regulars among my imaginary readers will know, I am a bit of a fan of hard-working regional Arkansas filmmaker Charles B. Pierce’s original Legend of Boggy Creek. The curiously authentic feel of a 70s documentary about Forteana with added restaging of Beast encounters that can turn out to be surprisingly creepy, the songs that comment on the action, the brilliant swampy atmosphere of the whole business all combine into something truly special that breathes a sense of its time and its place.

A decade and more than half a dozen films later, Pierce returned to the Arkansas swamp well, with decidedly mixed results. There was also a Pierce-less Boggy Creek movie, Return to Boggy Creek, in the meantime but let’s just ignore that one, like Pierce himself did.

At first, Boggy Creek II appears to go for the same mood of mock documentary scenes connected by a nature documentary voice track, but quickly, something of a more conventional plot develops. Gun-toting anthropologist Dr. Brian C. Lockhart (played by Pierce himself), two of his students (Cindy Butler and Pierce’s son Chuck Jr.) and a friend of student number one (Serene Hedin) travel to the Legend’s boggy home because the number of sightings in the last months has increased heavily, and the beast has begun to become rather aggressive. When they are not wandering the swamps, using high-tech of 1983 for their monster hunt, or have a melodramatic fight against a mad dog, Lockhart tells his students some Boggy Creek monster tales. These segments are clear attempts at recapturing the magic of the first movie, but they simply aren’t quite as good or fun as those in the original. They also tend to break up the little dramatic tension Pierce has been able to build in the adventures of Lockhart and company, giving the film a start/stop feeling for no productive reason whatsoever.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing worthwhile about Boggy Creek II whatsoever: Pierce can still be rather good at producing a feeling of a specific time and place, if now one that has to fight its way through the usual monster movie clichés; and the photography is often pretty. From time to time, Boggy Creek II even reaches small plateaus of actual campfire bigfoot tale creepiness. Which isn’t much when compared to the first movie, but did provide me with enough seasonal chills to make this less of a disappointment than it could have been.