In Praise of Love

Edgar is a director trying to pull together a project around the subject of love. While drawing it up the author meets a young woman he once knew very well and he spends time with her again while jumping through the various funding and organisational hoops. In the second part of the film we skip backwards two years to the point where the author originally met the woman. At this point in his life he is representing Hollywood and is in the process of purchasing the rights to the story of the girl's grandparents, who ere in the resistance during the majority of World War II.

There's one thing to be said for Godard and that's that you can be fairly confident he isn't going to be directing the next Harry Potter film as this 2001 movie shows he is as difficult and rewarding as he could be. The first half of the film is in black and white, while the second is in blistering digital colour. If my plot summary suggests a total cohesion then forget it – the suggested connection with a romance is more from my summary than the actual film. Instead what we have is free flowing dialogue that covers issues around America, art, love, age, humanity and so on – it is difficult to get into but it is worth trying. The dialogue is rather pretentious and too 'deep' to be natural or realistic but it still engages the brain in a way that kept me interested even if I struggled to get into narrative or characters, or to really agree with much of what was being said. I say it is worth trying but I would suggest that this makes it a weak film by the standards of more linear films and should be seen as more of an experience than a story or 'normal' film.

Matching this, the direction is both hypnotic and off-putting. Shots are framed in very arty ways with the characters in shadow, out of focus, out of shot etc for much of the film; the b&w section is crisp and feels older than it is, while the colour section is startling in its intensity. Again all this has the dual effect of coming across as rather pretentious and overly arty but then also being interesting enough and imaginative enough to keep you watching. Of course many audiences will be put off, and rightly so because not even once does this film take a step towards the audience to help us out – instead it pitches its tent and simply says that we can take it or leave it. In my own 'difficult' style, I managed to do both and found the film as frustrating and alienating as I did interesting and involving. The cast are hard to judge because they are rather stilted and cold throughout, but none of them really give anything that could be described as a poor performance.

Overall this is a strange film and one that is worth a try and worth sticking at for what it does well. However this is not as simple as it should have been and the film does very little to help the audience keep involved and interested. Visually it is true art-house stuff but yet is also great to look at – starkly beautiful or weirdly colourful; meanwhile the dialogue is unnatural and pretentious but yet still interesting and thoughtful. A strange mix but one that is worth a try.

Having pursued the political chimera that failed him in the 70's, Godard turned inwards. Having pursued, upon that realization, the reality of the mind, he discovers that only illusions inhabit it, and that it cannot be our saving grace nor can we truly know the world with it.

I come into these last few films in my Godard quest, with all its frustrations and rewards, for the last, transcendent leg of the journey beyond mind.

The answer by this film is no, and it further shows the limitations of what Godard had to deal with.

It's not that his creative powers, indeed his stubborness despite everything to exact moments of rare beauty out of nothing, have abadoned him or that he has outlasted his problems and inner demons because what was relevant in the 60's is very much relevant now and can still haunt as it it did then, but that as a matter of course he appears here uninspired.

So we get the old adagios on love and memory, the mind's annoying old habit of seeking truth or meaning, which we've heard elsewhere in his films in better form and proved to bring us not one step closer to a liberating awareness. We get "Every thought must recall the debris of a smile", banalities like he quoted in films like Pierrot, when he didn't know any better whereas now he does.

These things, which had led Godard earlier to realize the mind's impotence in the face of the great questions, are now mechanically, habitually repeated. Having lead nowhere then these ruminations, earlier a Socratic tool by which to interrogate the mind, now become tiresome, a purpose unto themselves. And more, the realization that wonderfully closes the Histoire(s) films, that only when life is lived in full, with all the powers available in our body, only then can life accept itself as the true answer, turns out to have been only reasoned, not truly felt. Instead of using it then as a tool of departure and reinvention by which to create a new cinema, Godard gives us more Nouvelle Vague, now mired in stagnation.

There's one marvelous touch in the film though: that present time is given to us in black and white, and the prolonged flashback that follows in the second half in garish colors. This is not a simple flashback then but memory, reality relived, which exists after the fact, always a step ahead of real life if we permit it. That is to say, if we never have memories of having remembered, memory can only take place "now", by assuming the place of reality.

Be sure how to express all that is communicated by silence and immobility, he quotes this by Robert Bresson as he did in the past. Yet he takes little from it, judging by this film. Little silence in which to meditate on the world as it is, instead more of the same old intellectual conundrums which, having been posed earlier in his work, by now should have been accepted or declined.

Critic Douglas Morrey says Godard's cinema is not simply about philosophy or cinema with philosophy, rather it is cinema as philosophy. The question is whether the film is concerned with philosophical issues, or a more simple polemic of how love is failed by the capitalist machine? Philosophy or socio-economics?

Filmmaker Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) pitches an idea for a project about love. When casting for the female antagonist, he meets a girl who he thinks he has met before. He later finds out that she has died. He soon realises where he had met her before in a flashback from two years before to when he was working on a production of suffering during WWII. The film is a critique on Hollywood and how capitalism is destroying cinema and love.

As for Socio-economics, (Late) Capitalism strives to be the End of History and would consequently maintain freedom of capital over the freedom of mankind (Demonstrable in the film where Edgar wants his film to be history not Hollywood)

The film succeeds in offering a philosophical problem, but demonstrates philosophy's inability to enter into any realm other than the abstract.

Godard here follows Marx' dictum: 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it'.

History. Hollywood and Americans (but which Americans? The ones without history who buy others' images, the ones between Mexico and Canada). Adulthood (which doesn't exist). Resistance and WWII. Cinema. Spielberg, Schindler. Balzac (but briefly). Simone Weil. The Matrix (dubbed into Breton, please!). The English. Nude scenes in films. Grandparents. The past, self and memory. What could be finer than a JLG romp through the modern world? It starts with B&W stock and ends in saturated video and imposed montage. It has texts, quotations, historical anecdotes, book covers; and hence is in itself eminently quotable. There can be no resistance without memory or universalism. Isn't it strange how history has been replaced by technology? But why politics by gospel? The Church is in step with time. The truth may turn out to be sad. Every thought should recall the debris of a smile.

Vaguely didactic, this film left me slightly worried about JLG's intensity as an artist of ideas. There's signs of the onset of scattered carelessness, of not being bothered with the unity or expressive power of ideas. And unity is what JLG's extraordinarily broad canvas has always been about. It's still hallmark JLG — no other director can get away with such a bold and direct transcription of ideas onto film. I was channel surfing of an evening and came across spare B&W dialogues about artists and projects and literature. I thought, This could only be by a New Wave director. There's the standard multiplicity, or what I like to call the trialogue of his style: dissociated, cut-up or multileveled/multilingual dialogue layered onto diverse semantic images, sometimes doubled images or of varied media, mixed with natural sound, musical refrains, interjections. Text, sound, image — usually concordant, sometimes broadly dissonant and multivalent, sometimes silent. But always thinking, writing, philosophizing. A poetry of three media; a tricolour meditation. And, as always, things, ideas and events shift subtly in meaning in the JLG cinema, in the space of thought, the crossed trialogue, the unreality of the mind — a train deliberately honking past an ambling reader is somehow neither intrusive nor uncontrolled; there's a sense of pre-ironic structuralism maybe (from studies in ethnology), of images stripped of semantics and signs, to toss jargon in a way unfair to a film decidedly a-theoretical. But when a character turns and says, When did the gaze collapse? and the dialogue becomes one about TV's precedence over life (I feel our gaze has become a program under control. Subsidised. The image, Sir, alone capable of denying nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us. (I hope not, says another)), then you're in very close and delicate (as narrative) thought space. Something close to mere ideas, or ideas only, stripped of coherent context. There's also a background insinuation of deeper melancholy or near futility; of the difficulty of making a difference through signs and words, of fatigue or exhaustion with the world and ideas; as though JLG no longer wills the poetry from the image or desires its latent mystery. Whether or not this functions as a critical element of the film re: modern media, I dunno. The worry lies in resultant projects that are mere thought files set to image and music.

The film seems to be stitched together with quotes. Let feelings bring about events, not the contrary. Be sure to exhaust what can be communicated by stillness and silence. (Bresson) What bothers me is not success or failure. It's the reams and reams written about it... Why bother saying or writing that Titanic is a global success? Talk about its contents. Talk about things. But don't talk around things. Let's talk on the basis of things... They're confusing life with existence, treating life like a whore which they can use to improve their existence. The extraordinary to improve the ordinary. One can enjoy existence, but not life...

All in all, I can't say this is satisfying cinema like Two or Three Things I know About Her or Masculin, féminin, and there's almost zero performance quality in this — just bland faces reading (not acting) mildly philosophical lines (these characters are not even objects, let alone subjects). Neither has it the shouted intensity and layered brain work of Hélas Pour Moi. Eloge is not a plot less anti-story but something nearly a-storical that retains elements of meta narrative (disquisitions on tragedy etc). A lack of emotional integration or joyous inwardness, offset by tired, late-night images reaching for poetry and finding very little (the most suggestive scenes were the empty train sheds). And not as much sharp humour as could be: the Americans get the occasional barb, but they're mild, easy stings. Not a consistently questioning essay nor an intensely located setting for ideas and disquisition, nor an acting out thereof, this is largely a struggle to define the late arrival and realisation of History in terms that are opposed to cinema and culture (the yanks with their contracts and fat thoughtless dollars, the exploitation of historical verité, the End of Cinema etc). Sporadic without rambling, unreal whilst actuating thought (the intrepid manufacture of ideas), I yearned for the guerrilla-intensity of hardcore JLG. He's still one of the primary artistic models, and I love his head space, but...

Rino Breebaart

Be warned: It's not a movie! At least not in the way we commonly understand this word: it's not entertaining. And, don't be misled by the title, it's not a love story either. It's a reflection from one of the most important thinkers and intellectuals of our times, on age, memory, history, resistance, society, culture and sense of life. If you are familiar with Godard's always-experimental style, you'll be fine and leave the theater thinking of the questions he raised or more precisely, the questions he formalized for us. Godard is important because he always helps us to formalize concepts that are sometimes difficult to put in words. In his earlier films he has raised questions about love, relationship, adaptation to a changing society, rebellion and resistance. Now Godard is 71 and looks back at life reflecting, as an old man will, on memory and history, as a way to reclaim our lives (as a character says in the film) diluted if not stolen by our modern society. As he says all over the film "there is no resistance without history" and that is a very important statement, no matter which way you want to use it. Godard began resistance a long time ago as one of the founders of the French New Wave, defining a new art form by taking the camera into the streets, and shooting with direct sound as a way to tell the truth. (He used his camera to show life as it was, undiluted) Truth has always been one of his important fights. Not because he is a moralist but because he opposes the ones who try to make us believe that lies are the truth.

In"In Praise of Love" he uses the image of Spielberg and Hollywood, which steals history, diluting it and reclaiming it in a more convenient way. We see an American agent coming to buy the rights to the story of two French resistance fighters to make a movie, the way Spielberg made "Schindler's List". However, the reality is that the old woman actually betrayed her lover during the war then they reconciled and stayed together after words. Of course Hollywood would never show this type of betrayal, the separation or the reconciliation although this is the undiluted truth.

But as Godard says with humor, "North Americans don't have a name", "Mexicans are North American and they are called Mexicans, Canadians are North American and they are called Canadians", but North Americans don't have a name and it's why they have to steal other people's history to make their own. The same way the Nazis stole paintings from Jews during the war that another character in the film is trying to reverse by buying back the paintings. This desire for truth is emphasized by the main character, a director who is working on an uncertain project that may take the form of a film, an opera or a play where the only thing he knows is that it will be on the "four moments of love: the meeting, the physical passion, the separation, then the reconciliation." This same character is helping our director because he wants him to make something in his life "more than money". We now touch on Godard's resistance to the failure of a modern society that pushes people to commit suicide, as two characters in the movie do. We know everything has a price and is sold and bought: history as North Americans have, memory as the two resistance fighters do in order to fix their hotel, sex as a prostitute tries in the film, and of course, art. As an old man looking at his life, Godard wonders how "memory can help us reclaim our lives", in other words: who am I but a product sold and bought, manipulated and lied to? The present is filmed in beautiful black and white 35 mm and the past uses video images shown in even more beautiful saturated colors, similar to the way memory intensifies the past (All the young directors who made video their medium of choice, should take lessons from the old man!).

Godard's video images are a major source of emotions, and as his character says in the film: "emotions should bring events and not events emotions". Can memory then, as well as history, help us resist but even more, learn? Of course we should learn from history and memory, which the contemporary society tries to avoid, and here is the central subject of the film: becoming adult. As Godard explains, when we see a child or an old man in the street, we say here is child or an old man. We never say, here comes an "adult". Like North Americans, adults don't have a name they have stories to define them. But, at the end of their life what remains? Only stories or bits and pieces of a story like the film?

Yes, the film is made of bits and pieces, intercut by a black screen and people talking on top of each other. But isn't this the way life is?

It's an effort to get into the true message of the film. But thanks to Godard, truth doesn't come for less. The movie more than praising love, praises resistance, resistance to this mediocre culture which falsifies the truth and take us down to mediocrity with it. The style is as much an act of resistance than the content.

"In Praise of Love" is a masterpiece of reflection, to help us enter in resistance and look at ourselves. Cinema can't do much more than that.

Movies can't make a difference more than that. Let's hope that Godard will make movies