Rightly accorded the prestigious French Gala slot at the London Film Festival - following a rapturous Cannes reception earlier this year - Eloge de l'amour (In Praise of Love) is quite simply, even by Godard's mercurial standards, an astounding work. To be released on November 23rd, it will mark the director's first film in British distribution since the poorly conceived and received King Lear some 14 years ago. Non festival-goers have a treat in store.
Whilst a plethora of recent nouvelle vague and voguish reissues and exhaustive retrospectives have done much to remind us of the gargantuan influence Godard has had on modern cinema there lingered the suspicion that his best work was in the past. Recent, little seen films (Histoires du Cinema, a moving mediation on the moving image excepted) had tended toward the didactic. Though still suggestive of a fierce cinematic intelligence and willingness to engage with both form and complex, typically Godardian thematic issues - politics, philosophy, the abject redundancy of popular culture - these works were at best half-realised. Godard had undoubtedly bequeathed an impressive and provocative legacy but what part could he play in cinema's future?
Eloge..., ostensibly a story of love, is told in two distinct parts. The first occurs in present day Paris as discussions are taking place about a project titled 'Eloge de L'Amour'. The project deals with the four key moments of love: meeting, passion, separation and reconciliation. Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), the director of the project searches for a leading lady, choosing Bertha, (Cécile Camp) a woman he feels he has met before. Before the project can begin however, Edgar learns that Bertha has taken her own life. In a flashback to Brittany (the second part of the film), we encounter two elderly veterans of the resistance who are negotiating the sale of their life story under Nazi occupation to unscrupulous Hollywood producers. Steven Spielberg is lined up to direct and Juliette Binoche is considering a part. The couple, it transpires, are friends of an eminent historian Edgar is interviewing. Confused by the intricacies of the legal documents, the pair ask their granddaughter, a trainee lawyer, to assist with the contract. The young woman is Bertha.
Back in Paris for the first time since Masculin Féminin (1966), Godard shoots the film's first section in highly defined black and white 35mm. Achingly beautiful, it's a timeless yet also distinctly modern elegy to the city. Highlighting the film's reverse chronology, Godard then segues into highly saturated digital video. Equally mesmerizing and lyrical, the colour sequences have a distinctly serene quality (there is the repeated motif of waves breaking on a shore) with the use of freeze-frame often giving the impression that we are in fact looking at a painting (a feeling Godard similarly invoked in Passion, 1982). Few films in recent memory have used the textural qualities of stock in so edifying and inventive a way. The use of sound seals the film's technical perfection.
Though densely constructed and at times willfully elliptical (repeated viewings are suggested, which should make the distributor happy) Eloge... is also wonderfully reflexive, witty and playful. The constant references to the bastardisation of indigenous culture (film and otherwise) by the likes of Hollywood - Spielberg is a particular bête noire - is often laugh-out-loud funny; the film is no mere intellectual conceit. Thematically of course it hunts for big game, taking in man's place in history, the varying notions of resistance, the disparity between past and present and of course the role of cinema.
A major work by one of cinema's greatest living directors (in a recent interview Godard was asked if he could, like the hero of Alphaville (1965), be called a legend. He simply replied 'yes'), Eloge de L'amour suggests that Godard is still very much a part of cinema's future.
Reviewed by Jason Wood
Reader comments about Eloge de l'amour
martin dumas (mdumas@naalc.org) writes:
Godard's Eloge is technically perfect and beautifully inspired. His frustration directed towards the 'Etats-Uniens' in general is sometimes unacceptable though: Godard's idea that Americans have 'no history' and that they are inclined to 'steal the history of others' is one example of this. Another is this suggestion that one should not refer to the worldwide success of a movie (movies such as Spielberg movies?!), but simply to its contents. If we were to use this reasoning at a more individual level, such as the personal achievements of an artist, one should definitely not treat Godard as a 'Legend', but as an artist who benefits from an incredibly developped artistic eye...
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