Godard Mon Amour

At the beginning of 1968 Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most highly-respected directors working in French-language cinema. He is influential and admired. He has also just married Anne Wiazemsky, a teenage actress seventeen years his junior. He has the more arty end of the film world at his feet, yet he is feeling restless. Then erupt the Paris student protests which sweep Godard up in their revolutionary fervour. He becomes a supporter of the movement, and his opinions are in turn sought out by the young leaders (although, in the best tradition of ideologues everywhere, they also spend a large amount of their time arguing). As his marriage to Wiazemsky suffers, Godard heads further down what some might describe as a Maoist path, culminating - for this film's purposes - in the establishment of a sort of film-making collective without heirarchy - Godard may be the director, but his artistic vision is subordinate to the will of the workers. Hah! From the plot description this might seem like a terribly gloomy film; far from it. It is actually very playful: as Godard, Louis Garrel has to deliver directly to camera the line "I bet if you told an actor to say actors are dumb, he would do it"; and a scene where Godard and Wiazemsky (played by the frequently-undraped Stacy Martin) discuss film directors' enthusiasm for nude scenes is played with both actors naked. How accurate Garrel's portrayal is I am unable to say, but for an actor who has rarely before displayed any comedy chops he provides a fine, subtly comic turn here; I particularly like the hangdog look his Godard at times displays.

I am not massively familiar with either Godard or his work; I have little patience with pretention. But this film makes the famed auteur a more accessible - sometimes rather likeable - individual, without glossing over his faults (rudeness; arrogance; a controlling element in his relationship with Wiazemsky). Whether it is a fair representation of him I do not know, but it makes for a very interesting film.

Non-admirers of Jean-Luc Godard probably won't be bothering to watch this film in the first place, but I'm sure they'd be reasonably satisfied with the hatchet job that author Anne Wiazemsky and director Michel Hazanavicius have done on Godard, since even most of his admirers as a filmmaker and political guru probably already had a pretty bleak estimation of him as a human being.

Being based on a 2015 memoir by Godard's long estranged ex-wife, the late Anne Wiazemsky (1947-2017), the film is inevitably going to be as much about her as him, and its depiction of him even more inevitably from her jaundiced viewpoint. This also unfortunately means that the film concentrates on their time together between their marriage in 1967 and their separation in 1970, when both his gifts as a filmmaker and passion for cinema had recently curdled; although there was still enough of the film nerd in him to claim with a straight face (in probably the film's best scene) the legacy of Jerry Lewis more worthwhile than that of Jean Renoir. (I wonder how Godard took the news - if it ever reached him - of Lewis's later enthusiasm for Reagan and Trump.)

During his previous marriage to Anna Karina he was probably just as difficult a husband but hadn't become the politically doctrinaire bore and boor that Wiazemsky had to deal with (she portrays him as self-centred and neglectful rather than abusive). Godard's admirers at the time and since have tended to excuse the calamitous decline in the quality of his films after 1965 as politically justified, since they saw the unwatchable screeds he was now churning out as the legitimate expression of his commitment to "make films politically" by no longer making them entertaining rather than because he'd simply lost it.

Louis Garrel gives an energetic performance in the lead, but is too tall and good looking (he actually looks more like Jean-Pierre Léaud), fails to capture the nasal voice familiar from Godard's own films, his perennial 5 o'clock shadow has become designer stubble and then a full beard by the time the film ends; and he just isn't as weird and inscrutable as the man himself remains to this day.

Hazanavicius throughout lovingly recreates the look of Godard's early 60's films when he was in his prime, but treats him more as a comical figure like Woody Allen, complete with the running joke lifted from 'Take the Money and Run' in which his glasses keep getting broken and the admirer who like those in 'Stardust Memories' wishes he'd make another "funny film". (Not that Godard's pre-1968 films were all light-hearted bon-bons by any stretch of the imagination. 'Le Petit Soldat' and 'Les Carabiniers', anyone?)

Movies about real historical events and persons from everyday perspective are cool.

This one's about the legendary French director Jean-Luc Godard (played by Louis Garrel) reaching middle-age and marrying a young girl (Stacy Martin). It turns out Goddard, idolized by movie lovers and critcs, turns out to be the immature one in the relationship.

Like any good movie about relationships should, "Le redoutable" has both moments of laughter and soul wrenching drama. But above all, this is a character portrait of a increasingly domineering and unpleasant man.

Writer-director Michel Hazanavicius approaches the study of the character from the deep psychological standpoint. He does not offer some easy and populist way of explaining the reasons behind tormented genius's growing disagreeableness over time.

Just like in real life, there's no one single cause for how one behaves, especially not something external that would be easy to blame and would adequately summarize everything that's going on in human soul (bad influence, broken heart etc).

If the viewer is not willing or able to go that deep, there's still enough going on to justify the time spent. The movie is humorous - especially in the first half - and offers a vivid overview about how destructive immature people can become in loving relationship if they wrestle with power and intimacy issues.

In Godard's character, I found much of myself and what I've had to wrestle with in relationships - and still have to. So watching it was a bit depressing for me, for probably nobody enjoys seeing one's ow faults so clearly from aside (in others).

The second half turns increasingly darker in mood and get exhausting because there's basically only one situation filling the story which gets repeated over and over again. The lack of variety is the reason of me hesitating to give it higher score than 7 out of 10.

The story centers mostly on Godard and young wife, Anne Wiazemsky, and their performances are really good. These are demanding roles because the marital discord doesn't grow from one explosive conflict to another but accumulating stress and tension between two people, expressed mostly in subtle bodily or facial impressions that the camera eagerly catches.

This kind of inner burning based suspense is surely difficult to build on screen, and both stars are really good at it (with the help of the director, of course).

I enjoyed Stacy Martin's performance especially, for in a way, she has fewer resources to build the character than Garrel whose Godard does most of the talking.

Martin gives a beautifully restrained but emotive performance as the ever-suffering wife. She's the emotional backbone of the story and probably the one thing you'll remember the best from the movie.

Based on the memoir of Anne Wiazemsky, who became a novelist and published the book on her life with French cinema genius in 2015. Godard lives on, but she passed away just weeks ago, October 5th this year, succumbing to battle with breast cancer at the age of 70.

Michel Hazanavicius is best known for "The Artist" that got nominated for ten Oscars, and won five, in 2012, including for the best movie and director.

Redoubtable is a sporadically amusing - but never touching - story of the legendary Godard as seen, more or less, through the eyes of his young wife, Anne Wiazemsky. His Chinese movie, starring Anne, has been repudiated, by the Chinese. At a loss, Godard marches with the angry students of 1968, declaring that the revolution is all and his previous movies are all merde! The young Anne follows along, dutifully, affectionately, but with growing alienation. She, obviously, wants to live, and her husband wants to sulk, and get his glasses broken time after time.

It's surprising how engaging this movie is, even if you still haven't gotten around to watching À bout de souffle (1960), Godard, who was still alive at the time, is presented as a comic character, a pretentious pseudo-intellectual (or just an intellectual, they're all pseudo, aren't they?). Anne is presumably meant to represent us, today. Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin play the roles successfully, but I couldn't help wondering, given Godard's fame, if the portrait wasn't a bit harsh.

The movie is occasionally very funny, but in a very arch sort of way, which I suppose indicates that the entertainment value will decline quickly, much like life with Godard. But the movie is elegantly made and energetic for all the pouting, and, thus far, it hasn't worn out its welcome.

Enjoyable existential crisis.

I don't exactly envy the task the director here, Haznavicius, set himself, since it basically involved constant aping of Godard's essentially inimitable style. Actually, as Godard imitations go, it's OK, though, somewhat inevitably, way dumber than its model. Still, you just can't. Almost the whole point of Godard, as this film acknowledges, is his relentless defiance of convention. To imitate the style of that defeats the purpose even if you do it well. Or worse, it just adds to our own era's deathly, Wes Andersonish embrace of the hollowed-out fake past and hopelessness about doing anything really new and vital now or ever again.

Still it does seem, from reviews here, to have appealed to a few Godard virgins who might, with luck, go on to discover the real thing. And it does make a nice point about a conflict in Godard's character that seems key to the effect of his films: the coexistence of an almost superhuman playfulness and inventiveness with, paradoxically, the most dourly humourless of political outlooks - plus a misanthropy that might have justified itself via the politics, but probably goes tragically deeper. I'm not, by the way, saying any of this to damn leftism in general, which is my own position, so much as the near murderous, proto-Baader-Meinhof strain that late-60s radicalism somehow gave rise to.

In its examination of the then 35-year-old Godard's paranoid romantic jealousy vis a vis teenage wife Anna Wiazemsky (upon whose memoir the script is based) the film likely also sheds light on the sour misogyny that definitely made its way into his work at the worst of times. That said, at least his latent Calvinism or whatever (this is the explanation given here) prevented him from demanding of his actresses that they strip, which is not at all the case in this film. It tries a meta joke about this, which, like a lot of is humour, falls flat.

By the by, and not with nudity in mind, I'm really disappointed the lead here wasn't the star of Blue is the Warmest Colour since she's practically Wiazemsky's twin.