Je vous salue, Marie

Without going into too much about it, this is more a image piece, the religious retelling about the story of the virgin Mary, who got mysteriously pregnant. The small film in it's starting, "The Book of Mary" is of Mary as a child, who lived in wealth. Her parents split up, where the sweet, little and very mature child, would visit her father, every often. The way the little Mary interacted with her parents, especially her mother, makes you appreciate what having a families about. The nude scene in the bath with mother and child, I admit, was confronting, it's frankness of not holding anything back, expressing the inestimable love between them, a natural human emotion, was one of many beautifully filmed scenes. I like the scene too with the father, helping the daughter with her trigonometry. Beautiful told. Some scenes were repeated, I don't why, like the shot of a jet, sailing over the woods. The second real film, has Mary grown up, her lover, a taxi driver having to come to terms with the unexplained pregnancy. Mary of course, can not allow herself to get pregnant, shunning the boyfriend when he goes to feel her stomach. This beautiful film does feature some nude shots of Mary, a beautiful actress filling the role, with such innocence, and independence in a film, it's beautifully told tale worth the view alone, for the double minded viewer. This controversial piece will cater also, to that a small number, who would given it the flick while sitting on the video shelves, including the non arty viewers. Incidentally, in Adelaide, in it's showing in 1985 at the Fair Lady, someone made a bomb threat, if the screening season went ahead.

When this movie came out in 1985, I was in high school and quite interested in seeing it. I was raised Christian, and have always had a special interest in Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

I recently bought a copy of the film for $1 at a local video store "going out of business" sale. I thought the film might not really be as bad as I remembered it (after all I was only 15 at the time!!!) and figured for $1, what do I have to lose. The answer was perfectly clear when I watched it last night....

This movie is neither inspiring NOR blasphemous...it's just NOTHING.

A movie asking the question "What if Jesus was born today?" could be a very interesting film. But "Hail Mary" never even tried to really tell the story of "The Virgin Birth". Instead, we are bombarded with countless images of teenage Mary (played by Myriem Roussel) caressing her nubile naked body and playing with her pubic hair. At one point the camera is so close to Roussel's crotch the whole world became her gynecologist! This doesn't move the story along or even come off as "artistic nudity". It's pure shock value and nothing more.

The characters are incredibly unlikable. Mary is a cold, rude girl. Joseph is a sex crazy cab driver. The Angel Gabriel is a violent b***ard who can only be calmed by a little girl that travels with him. Juliette Binoche plays "Juliette", the high school tramp who is trying quite hard to get into Joseph's pants. Seriously, this movie is a MESS!!!

There is also a pointless subplot of a college student named Eva (played by Anne Gautier)who is having an affair with her older married professor (played by Johan Leysen). There is a very random nude scene involving these two that I still can't figure out.

Seriously, don't even bother with this film.

Hmmm...I don't know if anything that I say about this movie will be relevant to anyone else. This movie has been in my consciousness for over 20 years and has influenced me in one way or another.

Trivia: It was because of the moving and sublime use of Mahler's 9th and Bach's Partita in this movie that I sought out the works of these composers and they've since become important points in my musical foundation.

At the lake the professor speaks of signals from outer space, the sound in the background is an electronic bzzt bzzt...but in the next shot we see the sound is merely the professor's magic marker as he doodles.

Mary politely nodding to instructions given by her basketball coach while piano music (J.S.Bach's wtc book1 prelude 1) swells in and out overwhelming the coach and the noise on the basketball court. She is still smiling and nodding and acting according to the earthly matters at hand even though The Voice calls to her. It is a very beautiful piece of cinema.

Mary and Joseph talking on the pier. In order to see him, Mary has to block out the blinding sun with her hand: that's the whole meaning of Mary brilliantly focused into one image.

The "oui, non" strophe/antistrophe appears first as a monologue by the student guiding the rubik's cube manipulator's hand to the solution, and then later as a monologue by Mary guiding Joseph's hand.

The "oui, non" strophe/antistrophe also appears in Godard's short film "Armide", his part of "Aria".

The little girl angel instructing Mary to "be pure, be tough." (I only have the Japanese DVD, so I'm paraphrasing. The original French is more flowing.) This is the first New Wave film - the first Godard film - I ever saw.

I discovered Jean-Luc Godard by reading James Monaco's "The New Wave".

I only plucked the Monaco book off the library shelf because at the time I was obsessed with "New Wave" bands like The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, New Order, etc.

The lipstick circles Myriem Roussel's open mouth, the end.

Hail Mary is done in the exact same style as the only other late Godard film I've seen, First Name: Carmen, which, I believe, he did right before this one. The narrative is fractured, much more so than even his classical films such as Breathless and Pierrot le fou, and it is impossible to understand exactly what's going on. Like in many of his early films, he plays with sound effects and music. It may have been clever and interesting in Une femme est une femme, but it has grown old here.

Still, Hail Mary, like First Name: Carmen, musters enough mood to make it well worth seeing. With First Name: Carmen, I was interested at the beginning and bored by the end. Here, although the prologue is quite good, the first half of the real film bothered me, and the second half grew more interesting as it progressed. What I'm saying here is that you have to stick with it and be patient. It can be rewarding.

Also, Hail Mary seemed to me one of Godard's more visually accomplished films, probably second to Vivre sa vie. You'll see some of the most gorgeous photographs of clouds and the sun, the moon, fields, flowers, and nude women. Some of the nudes are absolutely stunning and it never felt to me pornographic (unlike First Name: Carmen). They reminded me of beautiful paintings that I have seen by the likes of Lucien Freud (I don't know if people know him, but I was particularly struck by some of his sleeping nudes; I think he is the son of Sigmund, and I know he was a companion of Francis Bacon). Other more abstract photos reminded me of Picasso. 7/10.

First of all, the supposed obscurity or the film. The first bit, 'The Book of Mary', is a short directed by Godard's partner and long-time collaborator, Anne-Marie Mieville. Its main connection with 'Hail Mary' is that the girl, Mary, is called Mary... Oh, and that the two films are always shown together.

Watching 'Hail Mary' while the religionists are fighting one of their wars, I find it embarrassing to admit I noticed, but: there's nothing obscure about the film; it's a dead straight retelling of all that bible stuff. A lot of the film's pleasure is recognition: oh, that was The Annunciation! Look, Jesus has run off to the Temple! Of course, Eve and her Czech emigre lover don't have anything to do with Mary and Joseph, but as soon as you realise that it's him, rather than her, who's important, it becomes clear: Oh, yeah, he's that 'voice crying in the wilderness', making ways straight, etc, John the Baptist! This is where the problems start. Visually, the film's amazing: nudes, lakescapes, sunrises, moons--transcendent images are rarely so alluring. But when religious ideas are 'updated'--the baptist as a prophet of computers and Rubik Cubes; Gabriel as air-travel--they just seem arbitrary, and the attempt to preserve their transcendent qualities plays itself out as farce. By the end, despite the technical accomplishment, I'm left thinking Godard's accidentally remade Life of Brian.

Worth seeing for the glimpse of Binoche, though, while she's still the sexiest hen about, and before The New Bridge Lovers turned her face into a bourgoise fetish.