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…

This is a sweet film in much of the way of Varda's documentary works (a lot of which are extras for DVD releases, and all of which are worth watching), a very self-consciously confected tale of two people meeting and collaborating on artworks across a series of small French villages. JR's art seems to involve photographing people and pasting them on buildings and other large-scale public spaces, which is fairly whimsical, and then there's a made-up meet-cute and they hit the road in a picaresque tale of encountering small-town people on their level and then aggrandising them. I'd feel weird about seeing myself on walls, but most of the people here don't, and perhaps that's Varda's power. She is so…