Elogio del amor

Magnifique, artistic collage of changing times, values and worldview. While at times, the film is a bit difficult to follow (a la Godard), I think Jean-Luc cleverly works with colors and innovative filmmaking techniques to provoke the audience to consider the eclipse of art, history, devotion and faith by technology and a world of cold economics and pragmatics. Very few filmmakers can pull off a postmodern approach or style portraying societal views and values in a way that reaches the audience at both emotional and intellectual levels. The film is understandable yet artistic and profound.

I would like to think that I am pretty open minded about the films I go to see and can usually extract some sort of pleasure from almost any big screen event but...., whilst not being particularly familiar with Godards' work I can honestly say this was truly terrible.

I was unable to pick up very little from the plot and cared even less about the characters. To be fair it's one of the shortest films I have seen recently (just over 90 minutes) but my mind was almost numb after about half an hour. I was very near to falling asleep.

The film seemed very poorly subtitled. There were scenes which had alot of dialogue but seemingly very little translation. (I was poor at French at school).

Perhaps I would have understood more about it and maybe enjoyed it better if I had seen it with friends and maybe discussed it afterwards, as I did recently with "Lovely Rita" and "A Ma Souer!".

I am now going to bed, hopefully dreaming of Jean-Pierre Jeunet movies instead!

Having pursued the political chimera that failed him in the 70's, Godard turned inwards. Having pursued, upon that realization, the reality of the mind, he discovers that only illusions inhabit it, and that it cannot be our saving grace nor can we truly know the world with it.

I come into these last few films in my Godard quest, with all its frustrations and rewards, for the last, transcendent leg of the journey beyond mind.

The answer by this film is no, and it further shows the limitations of what Godard had to deal with.

It's not that his creative powers, indeed his stubborness despite everything to exact moments of rare beauty out of nothing, have abadoned him or that he has outlasted his problems and inner demons because what was relevant in the 60's is very much relevant now and can still haunt as it it did then, but that as a matter of course he appears here uninspired.

So we get the old adagios on love and memory, the mind's annoying old habit of seeking truth or meaning, which we've heard elsewhere in his films in better form and proved to bring us not one step closer to a liberating awareness. We get "Every thought must recall the debris of a smile", banalities like he quoted in films like Pierrot, when he didn't know any better whereas now he does.

These things, which had led Godard earlier to realize the mind's impotence in the face of the great questions, are now mechanically, habitually repeated. Having lead nowhere then these ruminations, earlier a Socratic tool by which to interrogate the mind, now become tiresome, a purpose unto themselves. And more, the realization that wonderfully closes the Histoire(s) films, that only when life is lived in full, with all the powers available in our body, only then can life accept itself as the true answer, turns out to have been only reasoned, not truly felt. Instead of using it then as a tool of departure and reinvention by which to create a new cinema, Godard gives us more Nouvelle Vague, now mired in stagnation.

There's one marvelous touch in the film though: that present time is given to us in black and white, and the prolonged flashback that follows in the second half in garish colors. This is not a simple flashback then but memory, reality relived, which exists after the fact, always a step ahead of real life if we permit it. That is to say, if we never have memories of having remembered, memory can only take place "now", by assuming the place of reality.

Be sure how to express all that is communicated by silence and immobility, he quotes this by Robert Bresson as he did in the past. Yet he takes little from it, judging by this film. Little silence in which to meditate on the world as it is, instead more of the same old intellectual conundrums which, having been posed earlier in his work, by now should have been accepted or declined.

This movie is a seduction that led me willingly through its labyrinth...not toward a Minator...but to the riches of cinematic imagery and intellectual meditation. Godard continues his exemplary journey into the unexpected, the unconventional, confounding, but with a paradoxically deliberate pull into the first hand experience of the mystery, not through a narrative telling, but in the evocation of the quick-cut images themselves. Despite the aphorisms and many linguistic delights that tease the mind, its the dense black and white film in the first half of the movie and the sudden shift to digital video color (symbolic, in its gaudiness, of the distortion that occurs in memory) that create effective impact.

In its content, the maturation process, memory, history, politics, resistance to the pseudo. and above all art in its many forms are dealt with largely through the eyes of the artist/creator...with a sense of note-taking and exploration. In its anti-Americanism there tends to be exaggeration and projection...although a wise comment ("They're just like us." i.e., the French) is a saving one.

The performances are splendid...totally believable with an almost documentary realism.

For any film-goer interested in imaginative, challenging movie fare this shouldn't be missed.

Critic Douglas Morrey says Godard's cinema is not simply about philosophy or cinema with philosophy, rather it is cinema as philosophy. The question is whether the film is concerned with philosophical issues, or a more simple polemic of how love is failed by the capitalist machine? Philosophy or socio-economics?

Filmmaker Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) pitches an idea for a project about love. When casting for the female antagonist, he meets a girl who he thinks he has met before. He later finds out that she has died. He soon realises where he had met her before in a flashback from two years before to when he was working on a production of suffering during WWII. The film is a critique on Hollywood and how capitalism is destroying cinema and love.

As for Socio-economics, (Late) Capitalism strives to be the End of History and would consequently maintain freedom of capital over the freedom of mankind (Demonstrable in the film where Edgar wants his film to be history not Hollywood)

The film succeeds in offering a philosophical problem, but demonstrates philosophy's inability to enter into any realm other than the abstract.

Godard here follows Marx' dictum: 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it'.