Passion

Despite the idiocy of the last comment there is an awful lot to be loved about Passion. The almost overstyled interiors of the studio set, complete with Painting Concrete (if you will) while the director and producer wander about discussing exactly how much per day it costs. Love it!

The narrative (yes it is there, just let your mind wander) is simple and familiar, the in jokes are hilarious, and the atmosphere, especially at the end scene with the ship in the forest is, at times, breath taking.

Yes it is dis-continuous, it is a film by JEAN-LUC GODARD! What do you expect. If you hate him, you'll hate this, if you love him, then this is destined to be one of your favourite JLG films (if you like his "mature" style that is).

It's not that I don't like arty films, I just found this so dreary. i can see why it may be of interest to a film-student, but to sit through it for entertainment purposes is certainly not recommendable! If you suffer from lack of sleep, check this out and it'll have you snoozing within no time at all. A christmas present for a friend you want to get rid of. In other words - pretentious crap.

This is a good introduction to late-period Godard: all (ideological) passion spent, Oncle Jean is just going to show us a good time. Pretty girls lolling around the pool naked, glamourous stars like Hanna Schygulla with little to do, Isabelle Huppert when she could still play dewy-eyed ingenues, a ridiculous peplum being filmed by greedy, unscrupulous types (the director should have been played by Jacques Dutronc instead of that dour Polish actor).

It's 1982,these are the Thatcher-Reagan years, nobody thinks about Vietnam or the Palestinians or civil wars in Africa--people only want to make money. Godard gives us hip product-placement, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Mozart instead of Coke or Pepsi.

Jean-Luc Godard's "Passion" can only be described as an absolute bore. The director presents his audience with a film that hardly has a storyline; there is no intrigue and no entertainment. Lets say that his pursuit for originality is the reason why it's all so strange and dull. The disjointed scenes means that the viewer quickly looses interest- this lack of continuity persists throughout the entire film. The classical music in the background sounds like a technical fault, as it inhibits the clarity of the dialogue- all I could hear was mumbled monotone voices. There is much confusion and it takes a lot of effort to identify characters and establish relationships between them.Being a film student myself, as much as I would like say that Godard moves away from typical Hollywood cinema and presents us with an artistic piece, the film is an absolute flop. The story does not develop, the nudity scenes are pointless, and the characters are uninteresting. When the film finally ended , I came out feeling unfulfilled.

Godard scholarship, lined along the axes of variants of French post-structuralism, would appear to have gotten it all wrong: a Godard movie can't be assimilated into a coherent and non-self-contradictory statement about work, gender, representation, or whatever academically approved topic you might name; it can't even be assimilated into a coherent process. What has to be confronted is that the work is essentially diaristic and subjective; these films are the more or less uncensored insides of Godard's head, not a white paper on a topic (no matter how "challenging" or "frustrating to expectations").

It also must be acknowledged that for Godard, even ideation is essentially sensuous, aestheticisable; ideas, like a piece of irruptive slapstick staging, a stale aphorism, a blast of the Mozart Requiem, are objects of delectation and desire, and finally repositories of aesthetic emotion--handwrapped presents. To say that the ideology of Godard's Maoist period was finally another aesthetic object for him is not to condescend to him as a radical-chicster. Very simply, Godard is an artist for whom the gland that produces aesthetic feeling works ten times more overtime than anyone else.

This produces the jarring and sometimes tonic feeling that we are overhearing the disordered and associative thoughts of God as He falls asleep. In a late, lyric work like HELAS POUR MOI, this quality becomes transcendent: the film is like a communication from a higher alien intelligence. In PASSION, that desire to aestheticize everything in sight, to wave a wand marked "excruciating beauty," in essence to make like a cinematic Goldfinger, is tripped up by the story Godard was required to tell in order to receive funding.

The necessity of telling a story is one of the (many) subjects that flit by in this production, which followed Godard's minorly popular comeback, EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF. And the story Godard tells is so halfheartedly offered it disrupts the all-pervasive atmosphere of heightened lyricism he generates elsewhere. In essence, it's the same old movie about the making of a movie: the director (Jerzy Radzilowicz) is an idiot caught between a virginal proletarian (Isabelle Huppert!) and a slatternly hanger-on (Hanna Schygulla). The director pontificates, the producer (Michel Piccoli) avoids paying checks, and the inevitable phone calls for completion funds are delivered in dirty rooms.

If this reminds you of everything from BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE to LIVING IN OBLIVION you're right; but nothing in those movies compared to Godard's strategy of contempt-uously making his stars Huppert and Piccoli stutter and cough, respectively. Or to the moment when a grip tells a child extra out of nowhere, "O those who will come after us--do not harden your hearts against us."

PASSION reminded me of John Simon's review of LE GAI SAVOIR, which began in the manner of, "I have seen no movie more illucid, arbitrary, and, yes, insane as..." PASSION genuinely is insane--it raises every line, every gesture, every landscape to a plane of unbearable intensity, and refuses to draw any lines between them. The cumulative effect suggests the personality of a slightly depressed but highly stimulated schizophrenic. Godard's late work is so beyond the prison of our narrative and identificational expectations that we may have to wait several lifetimes for its voice to be genuinely, not just indulgingly, heard.