Agnès Varda may not see as well as she used to, but her creative vision has never been clearer. If the magnificently moving, funny, life-affirming, and altogether wonderful “Faces Places” (or, in its original language, the much smoother “Visages Villages”) is to be the 88-year-old Belgian auteur’s last film, it will be because of her failing eyesight or the inexplicable difficulty she’s had with funding her work, and not because she’s run out of things to say or novel ways to say them.

If this is to be her last film, then it will be one of cinema’s most extraordinary sendoffs, as poignant and perfect a swan song as Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Wind Rises” or Abbas Kiarostami’s “Like Someone in…

I know a number of sensible people who adore Agnes Varda’s films. My partner, for one, found Visages, villages deeply moving. Maybe I’m just an old grump, but it had no such effect on me. I didn’t dislike it, although it had its irritations, and overall I found it likeable and watchable, but it never really touched me. Varda and photo artist J.R. travel France, taking photos, blowing them up and pasting them to walls, buildings, etc. (This is what J.R. does.) The France that is visited is one of villages, from goat farms to post industrial mining villages in the north. The people whose photographs are taken are the sort of people who generally go unnoticed. Varda and J.R.…