Woe is me

Woe is me -- In moments of weakness, I confess regretting that my Netflix account is congested with films from Jean-Luc Godard’s middle period – that is, movies produced between 1980 and 1995. These pictures pose severe difficulties. Every one of them is a duel to the death with the hyper-agile and combative film maker – he poses stylistic, narrative, and philosophical problems of the most daunting type and the viewer must wrack his brains attempting to solve these riddles. If I were not persuaded that Godard’s films were worth the effort – indeed, supremely worth the time required to provisionally decipher them – I would reject this body of work as willful provocation, sound and fury without meaning, and blatant obfuscation. My dilemma is that study of Godard’s films always shows me two things: first, the films do have a meaning and, in fact, can be interpreted to make sense of them, and, second, Godard’s distortions of film grammar and clarity, although initially baffling, are always rigorously logical and, often, reveal profound things about the nature of cinema. No one knows so many surprisingly different ways to string images and sounds together to create a sensory overload that contests and undermines conventional film narrative. Nonetheless, I must admit recoiling from the sheer challenge of construing a thing like Woe is Me (Helas pour moi), an artifact of unbelievable complexity and allusiveness. Woe is Me (1993) seems a companion piece in some ways to Detective (1985), a film on which I have earlier written. Detective is set in Paris and is resolutely urban; it is shot indoors for the most part with voice-overs meditating on the fate of our big modern cities. By contrast, Woe is Me is almost entirely shot outdoors at a café or resort on a rapturously beautiful Swiss lake. Woe is me is a pastoral counterpart to the urban film noir characterizing Detective. Both films employ a similar narrative device – someone is acting as a detective and attempting to unravel a mystery; in Detective, the characters are scrutinized by Jean-Pierre Leaud’s feckless hotel house-detective; in Woe is Me, a journalist named Abraham Klimt is attempting to solve some kind of mystery involving a woman named Rachel Donnadieu and her husband, Simon, that occurred in mid-summer 1989 – three or four years earlier. Woe is Me commences with a glorious and moving parable about the our modern lack of faith, narration counterpointed by stunning landscapes, and suggests from the outset that the narrator, Klimt, will not be sufficient to the task pending before him – a suggestion that Godard is not confident that he can successfully complete the challenge that the film poses for him as well. Indeed, after its prelude, the film begins with a false start – for ten or fifteen minutes, we follow events involving some students enrolled with a drawing teacher and, apparently, engaged in various unhappy love affairs with one another. (This gives Godard an excuse to film wonderfully gorgeous young girls and indulge a penchant for astonishingly beautiful landscape images.) These characters turn out to be peripheral, and a kind of Greek chorus, to the main thread of the narration – Klimt’s effort to unravel what happened between Rachel and Simon. The film’s narrative proper commences with a train roaring through a station and almost knocking two actors off the platform. This shot, in turn, is another false start since the train in question was supposed to stop at the station not roar past it. We get another shot of a similar train which stops. We expect Simon, played by Gerard Depardieu to appear from within the train, but, instead, we see some perky coeds hop off. Zeus or some kind of lecherous God is present but unseen. We hear his utterances in a horribly distorted insectoid voice that is truly terrifying. The god’s confederate, a tennis pro qua chauffeur, chooses one of the girls and offers her for his lord’s rape, but, then, is told to seek another. Apparently, the target of the god’s desires will be Rachel and the god will take the form of her absent husband to consummate his amour with her. (In broad terms, the film is a reprise of the German farce by Heinrich von Kleist, Amphitryon in which Zeus impersonates a Theban general to seduce his wife.) The principal stylistic device that Helas pour Moi uses is offscreen sound. We hear the hideous guttural words of the god but can’t tell where they are coming from. Similarly, we often hear voices speaking inexplicably in scenes where the characters are not talking or may be conversing about something completely different. In some instances, the off-screen voices, which create a continuously eerie and disorienting effect are voice-over narration; in other cases, a change in camera placement will reveal some character that we didn’t expect to be present located in an area that was previously off-screen. In one instance, we hear a peculiar voice say in English Stop talking and start chalking – a completely puzzling remark. The camera tracks on one of the actors and, finally, we see – this is clear only after a second or third viewing – that the strange mechanical voice emanates from a pin ball machine inexplicably sitting in a grove of trees and challenging people nearby to play. The name of the unhappily married couple, Donnadieu is a reference to the film’s star Depardieu; the soundtrack continuously roars with thunder, sometimes remote, sometimes near at hand showing, I think, that Donnadieu also means Donner-dieu (or Thunder – Donner in German – God). Depardieu’s character stalking through the fantastically lush and beautiful landscapes is Zeus plotting to cuckold Simon with Rachel, although, perhaps, the God inhabits Simon’s body or merely has adopted a form that looks like him. I am making this sound clear. Trust me it is not and everything that I have written could easily be disproven from other evidence within the film. However, I think, I have the grasped the general gist of the plot, such as it is. Unlike Detective this film is not crammed with occult references to other movies, although part of the Greek choral commentary on the action seems to be set in a video rental store – here characters gather to debate theology, the meaning of romanticism, and exchange arcane quotations.