It rains, the sun shines, it rains when the sun shines — it is April. Cruelest month? Probably, probably not. I’ve been in Hammersmith. It feels like an artificial city planted inside of the actual city. Anyway, this week’s (actually quite short) review: Godard. I’m writing very bluntly this year.
— The Institut Français has blue under-lights and white upper-lights. There’s a statue of a naked person — vaguely ‘Greek’ — and a very bright wall hanging. You’re greeted in French, and then you go to your seat — grey and soft and quite deep; with only about a quarter of the seats actually filled. In the lobby, people were greeting each other with real familiarity — like they always do this. Outside, the sun was shining — just about to sink behind the ‘big’ Leon and a pret-a-manger. Spring arrives all at once; bits of blossom sticking to your shoe. I don’t know if this is important. I’m just trying to set the scene.
— This screening is part of Kinoteka Film Festival, which is currently broadcasting all around London. It’s also part of a Jean-Luc Godard retrospective at the Institut Français, which they’ve really been keeping under wraps. I mean to say — I didn’t know about it. Until the screening. Is this bad marketing, or am I being unobservant?
— Godard’s Passion was made in 1982. It’s actually the first film of his I’ve seen since he died last year. I checked the scores on Letterboxd and was not disappointed — a film that exists somewhere between “LOL” (2 and ½ stars) and “sublime” (3 and ½ stars). Is the difference of one star the difference between LOL and the sublime?
— Introductions. Sometimes they go on too long; sometimes they’re too short. I think our presenter felt very upset, on our behalf, about the poor quality of the film print. Really, that’s why we were there — to see the rough edges and the dust and the grain. Yes it was a little pink. Somebody should probably restore it?
— After watching about 15 Godard films you begin to see his obsessions rise to the surface — the little stylistic tics that make him ‘him’. Passion was at its strongest when Godard allowed himself to be quiet and gentle and intimate, and it was at its worst when he was doing Weekend (1967) style madness — cars crashing about and people screaming. I love this stuff, these elements, but they only work in the context of a film like Weekend — where everything is insane, a bit unhinged. Bouncing back and forth between solemn moments of intimacy and brutal ‘I don’t know what’s happening’ antics sort of damages both. It’s like he was working through some of the more — I suppose — sublime language that he’d perfect with Carmen (1983) and Hail Mary (1985) just a couple of years later; and was learning to get rid of some of the methods he’d spent the late 60s and 70s exhausting. And these are good methods; just not the ones he was really trying to grapple with in the 1980s (when everything became much more loving and strained).
— But it’s still really, really beautiful — at times reaching this insanely unexpected place. You feel like it should end several times before it actually ends. You think: this is where it ends, and then it doesn’t — and there’s a car sitting in some snow, or a hotel cleaner – she keeps calling Jerzy (the protagonist) her “prince” — dancing by the side of the road. Then it ends; very abruptly.
— It’s a film about making a film – but there are also a handful of other narratives working their way beneath the surface. Worker’s rights — hotel management — art — Hollywood — language — money — the Solidarity movement in Poland. You kind of forget these things; they drift out of focus. What stays with you are the relationships – even if they’re hard to define — and the really careful and very beautiful recreations of baroque and classical paintings that the film’s protagonist (Jerzy) is trying to recreate in his own film (Goya, Rembrandt, Delacroix, El Greco, Ingres). These are framed really glacially — slow and almost a bit embarrassed, always a little ‘insufficient’ (Jerzy frequently complains about the lighting — how there is too much of it). There’s actually a funny joke here, when a section of the film goes very black — and we hear voices talking but can’t identify the speakers (it lasts maybe 20 seconds), as if Godard is saying: ‘well, here’s your film without lighting’. I suppose that Jerzy was really a stand-in for Godard himself — not just because he’s a filmmaker, but because he worries about the same things Godard worried about (like not selling out to Hollywood).
— Thinking back. Weekend is probably my favourite Godard film — maybe second-favourite [after Alas, Poor Me (1993)] — and it’s weird to see this sort of facsimile of that other film — shot basically twenty years earlier — mixed up with a slightly older Jean-Luc. His sense of humour was intact, as was his political framework. Generous reading is: he was trying to explain — to himself — what it would mean to ford the river between his (often hard to explain) political ambitions of the late 60s and 70s (when he made films, with Gorin, collectively, as the Dziga Vertov Group) and this ‘new’ him, who was trying to make ‘commercial’ films again (as he did in the early and mid 60s). Really, he’s saying goodbye to that earlier stuff — but his wave is a slightly hesitant one. Goodbye, sort of — while trying to find a new way to be very beautiful, searching for a new visual language that can carry him across the waters.
— Maybe we’re supposed to ignore all the chaos — the crashing cars and yelling and the factory owner ‘smoking’ a party streamer (I guess he’s trying to quit) — and experience how art can rise above life; or, that life can balance both — the beauty and the banality. It makes you wonder if Rembrandt tried to sleep with his models and gazed like a sad-sack out the window. Filmmakers are artists, too.
— Right, specifics. He favours the closeup — head and shoulders, intimate framing. Heads turned to their side, suggestion of a pout (Isabelle Huppert gets a lot of this treatment, her hair cropped short). He takes a lot of joy in showing us how Jerzy shoots his film — a big camera on a crane gracefully whirling around, tracking a group of riders and horses, eventually settling on the ground. We see little glimpses of ‘ordinary’ Switzerland — roads, houses, car parks — glimpsed through hotel windows; Switzerland without cowbells and mountains. Jerzy’s film never really comes together. He overspends; he frets about the lighting; he swaps actresses around (he’s trying to sleep with at least one of them). The whole production is a mess, except when it’s not a mess — when it becomes very soft and gentle. We don’t get why Jerzy is so convinced that the film is a flop — and you chalk it down to his artistic temperament; asking, could he ever be happy? He’s made a thing that is — in moments — objectively beautiful. But it isn’t enough. Maybe this is Godard laying his cards out. He was about to make some of his best work.
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