In Praise of Love
**** (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard With Bruno Putzulu, Cecile Camp, Claude Baignieres, Remo Forlani, Audrey Klebaner, Mark Hunter, and Jeremy Lippmann.
Edgar: “Over life.”
Eloge de l’amour translates literally as “eulogy of love,” but the funereal tone of the film might make “elegy”–“a song or poem expressing sorrow or lamentation, especially for one who is dead”–seem closer to the mark at first. The setting is Paris, and the stunning cinematography is in black and white, with some of the blackest nocturnal blacks imaginable. Once again, Godard is reflecting on his own practice as a filmmaker, though this time his personal investment in the material seems deeper than it was in For Ever Mozart and Helas pour moi (1991), and closer to the feeling of Nouvelle vague (1990), his best late feature before this one.
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In the film’s final section–set two years earlier and shot in video with floridly oversaturated colors–the themes of love and the French resistance finally become intertwined. Edgar arrives in Brittany to interview a historian, Jean Lacouture, about Catholics in the resistance, saying he’s “composing a cantata for Simone Weil.” This leads to his meeting an elderly couple, friends of Lacouture who fought in the resistance and have been together ever since–even though the man, following the orders of his superiors, exposed the woman as a member of the underground during the war. The two are now negotiating with a representative of the American embassy in Paris to sell their story to a Hollywood studio, for a feature to be directed by Steven Spielberg and written by William Styron and to star Juliette Binoche (who’s just won an Oscar for her part in The English Patient). The couple’s granddaughter, a legal trainee who advises them on the contract, is Berthe, the woman who will kill herself two years later.
“No other filmmaker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass,” Manny Farber wrote of Godard 34 years ago. Today Godard is just as intimidating. I’m gratified that I caught some film references in In Praise of Love. The final line of dialogue in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket is cited by a man standing in line at a movie theater, who happens to be film critic Noel Simsolo. Another scene contains an admiring allusion to Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple (the French poster for it is visible). There are also variants of lines from Roberto Rossellini (“Things are there. Why invent them?”) and from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“When the fact becomes legend, print the legend”), as well as a couple of songs from Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, nostalgically heard while a man and woman converse by the Seine. But I’m generally clueless when it comes to the literary quotations. The authors of a seemingly random ten of them are listed in the final credits, and though I recognize half of the names, I can’t connect them to particular lines of dialogue. But I’m sure I’m not meant to. The trick when watching Godard is to catch the pitch of his poetics, savor the pleasure of his sounds and images, and ponder the historical, philosophical, and ethical issues that intersect with them. Catching specific references is at best a minor sport; much more important is catching the beauty of the argument as it sails past in diverse forms. (“Every thought should recall the debris of a smile” is one relevant remark.)
Most of the rest of Godard’s anti-American brief in the film plays as follows: “Americans have no real past….They have no real memory of their own. Their machines do, but they have none personally. So they buy the past of others, especially those who resisted. Or they sell talking images. But images never talk.” It’s a sweeping indictment, justifiable perhaps when directed at Disneyland, but absurd when it encompasses such examples of American self-scrutiny as The Education of Henry Adams and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
