In Praise of Love

In Praise of Love – Late Godard: 2003. You can’t understand this film in terms of narrative until its ending. And so, the movie has to be seen several times in order to grasp what is happening. Even, then, parts of the film are indecipherable. Probably, a casual viewer – if there is such a thing for late Godard – should luxuriate in the film’s austere physical beauty and mood of somber, exquisite elegy. This might be enough to sustain interest despite the picture’s astringently rebarbative features. Another approach to the picture might be to savor the innumerable epigrams, quotations, and aphorisms – needless to say, the picture is crammed with wonderful and paradoxical statements, weirdly elegant philosophical arguments, and highly (and perversely) opinionated pronouncements. Whether this element is sufficient to support a viewer’s interest is also debatable, but In Praise of Love is certainly crowded with annoying, profound, and remarkable utterances. As far as I can determine, the movie depicts an artist, probably a film maker, named Edgar. Edgar is in his late thirties and has proclaimed an intent to create a work of art – it could be a play or novel or film or opera – through which History (with a capital H) will be channeled and revealed. It seems that the History that Edgar wishes to make visible relates in a broad sense to the Resistance – a term that comes to have many meanings as the film advances. Edgar’s project will combine three intertwined stories narrating the “three ages” – that is, youth, adulthood, and old age. From time to time, we see him interviewing people who might be cast in this “project.” The story about “youth” seems in to involve courtly love and the romance between Perceval and Eglantine. The story about old age is more obscure. Its subject might be efforts by an elderly man to reclaim paintings that were dispersed during the Second World War and, apparently, abducted to the United States. Or the subject of the narrative of old age might be an account of Hollywood agents, seemingly minions of Steven Spielberg, seeking to acquire rights to the memoirs of elderly survivors of the French Resistance – this is ambiguous, however, because although the story of the lovers fighting the Nazis is remembered by old people, the tale itself is one of youth. It’s pretty clear, and stated unambiguously several times, that Edgar can’t come up with a story about adults. “There are no adults,” someone says at one point. And it seems that, ultimately, the story about adults is Edgar’s project, which can’t be made because the central tale about people no longer young and not yet old simply doesn’t come into focus. Godard’s concept of resistance, accordingly, means the French resistance against the Germans, the “resistance” to completion of the project that blocks Edgar’s creative efforts, memory’s resistance to time, and, on a political level, the French resistance to all things American, reflected most emphatically in Godard’s hatred for the contemporary American cinema. Woven around these themes, which (with the exception to the venomous anti-Americanism) are very elliptically expressed, is discourse about street people and the homeless, an account of atrocities in Kosovo, Bresson’s speculations on the “cinematograph”, debate about the role of Catholicism and the Resistance, and meditations on the state of the Marxist revolution in France – we see a huge shuttered factory along the Seine that someone calls “the empty fortress.” The first two-thirds of the film are shot in lustrous, dense black and white – the night scenes of Paris are spectacularly beautiful. The last third of the picture, which takes place in Brittany and represents an extended flashback, is registered in some kind of digital video and is also gorgeous and surreal – Godard manipulates the images so that the turbulent sea sometimes appears as a raging ocean of blood and many of the pictures are so brilliant and expressionistically colored that they look like paintings themselves, an effect that Godard exploits by sometimes freezing, or severely slowing, the motion. (It seems that the lost paintings referenced in the first part of the film are somehow retrieved by these images.) The Brittany sequence involves representatives of a Hollywood studio, said to Spielberg’s company, attempting to acquire the rights to the Resistance memoir and meeting fiercely anti-American opposition by the grandchildren of the elderly couple – the old people are trying to sell the rights to their book to save their failing hotel. The Americans are repulsive, don’t pronounce French words properly, and have no respect for History. Godard singles out Cameron’s Titanic for derision and claims that Spielberg wouldn’t pay any royalties to Mrs. Schindler, who lives impoverished in Argentina. Ultimately, the grandchildren, particularly an obnoxiously anti-American daughter, persuade the old folks to renounce the transaction with Hollywood. It seems that rights to the Resistance love story are, then, granted to Edgar who, as we discover, can’t make the project – his creative failure is the subject of the first two-thirds of the movie. In the end, it seems, he reverts to his original plan which was to write a cantata about Simone Weil. I admire Godard’s late films but must acknowledge that their difficulty makes them inaccessible to almost any audience that I can imagine. The strength of this picture is its powerfully elegiac beauty.

Since writing this note, I have looked at reviews by other critics. Godard remains valuable because he retains the power to incite ferocious debate. Both Roger Ebert and Salon’s DVD critic vehemently denounce In Praise of Love on the basis of Godard’s avowedly anti-American sentiments – these writers seem hurt that Jean-Luc appears to despise them and their cinema. Ebert, who is normally very level-headed, is particularly aggrieved; he admits that he admired the film when he saw it at the New York film festival ten years ago, but now is wounded by the anti-American vituperation. But, on this subject, a few comments are, perhaps, in order. First, of course, Godard’s characters are not Godard – the woman who denounces the American film makers should not necessarily be thought to be advancing Godard’s own ideas on that subject. Furthermore, the more fierce the anti-Americanism, the more feckless and inadequate the character – the granddaughter who intervenes to derail her grandparents deal with Steven Spielberg isn’t necessarily doing them a favor. And Godard’s witty and aphoristic Parisian artists are incapable of bringing any of their projects to fruition. Second, the film features an American journalist named Mark Hunter who reports vividly on atrocities in Kosovo while Godard’s intellectuals yammer on helplessly, making murder into epigrams. As someone in the picture notes, “not all Americans are insufferable.” Third, Godard’s mockery of the Hollywood film types is pretty broad and, even, farcical – it has silent comedy elements: for instance, the American producer qua agent of the State Department is accompanied by an enormously tall Watusi-like black woman who we see repeatedly climbing in an out of a midget sports car that comes up to about the level of her knees. This is more comedy than satire. The Slate reviewer makes the snarky comment that Americans shouldn’t be lectured about Resistance by someone from a country that “basically welcomed the German invaders with the attitude: ‘we saved our best vintage wine for you.’ “ This isn’t exactly fair or coherent. Godard is Swiss and I think a lot of Frenchmen died fighting the Germans. But Godard’s point about Resistance, his meditation of the history of Resistance is an important one: Godard first loved American films passionately, welcomed them, then, became increasingly disenchanted, and, then, had to fight against – that is, resist – his own instincts and admiration for Hollywood B pictures. Both the Slate guy and Ebert note that Godard’s first film, Breathless, was dedicated to Monogram Pictures, a poverty-row studio that churned out forties and fifties film noir. In any event, Godard’s anti-American sentiments are nothing new: Jack Palance played an avaricious Hollywood film producer in Contempt snarling “when I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my check book” and American critics, including Ebert, have been notoriously tolerance of Godard’s silly, even loathsome politics in the past. No one complained about Godard’s noxious Maoism when he had Jane Fonda spouting Communist slogans in films like and The East is Red. So why are people mad at Godard now? I think it’s because post 9-11 Americans don’t feel that they really deserve to be treated as the world’s villain and, particularly now, with our sleek ebony liberal-democratic President in office, film critics don’t appreciate being bad-mouthed by Europeans whom we admire. I guess during the Vietnam war and Reagan era, people like Ebert thought Americans deserved to be castigated by European intellectuals – now, the very same criticism wounds us. It’s not that Godard has become more anti-Ameican – it’s simply that we’ve become thinner-skinned. Godard’s politics have always been a blemish to his films; he’s always been stupid and ill-informed on political matters. But like all great artists, his films are much more complex, deeper, and emotionally intricate than the slogans with which he adorns those pictures. At the radiant end of Notre Musique, Godard imagines a world in which war has been banished. Of course that paradise is centered on his beloved Lake Geneva. Probably, he meant to mock Europe by showing his peaceable kingdom guarded by United States Marines – in fact, we hear “From the Halls of Iwo Jima” on the soundtrack and see several black GIs patrolling the perimeter. If this is meant to be an assault on America, however, it certainly embodies a very complicated attitude toward American power.