Le Redoutable

Godard is not the sort of typical subject for a film. To say he lacks empathy, that he assaults the cosy preconceptions of much cinema and its audiences, is well-known.

At the time of this film he was undergoing a transition: he renounced his break-through films, he was intensely political in that celebrity French style which is often more pose and belles-lettres, than real accomplishment, a fact made clear in this film.

To present him in that anodyne fashion which Hollywood does, which is essential deceitful, as say "A Beautiful Mind" and many other movies, would be truly dishonest but fortunately this film does not do that. It is quite a good presentation of that period, both socially-politically and personally.

The film's style naturally, almost logically, had to be á la Godard, in some way, and it works without being pastiche. At times it pushes a little far but mostly enough to give that sense of how Godard's films looked at that time and before.

This is especially true of the interiors, a favorite setting and device of Godard's in the 1960s, where he had couples discuss and debate as they moved about apartments. Here the famous sequence in "Contempt" when Piccoli and Bardot's marriage ended is almost reprised as Godard and Wiazemsky's relationship shatters. The inspirational touch in this film was to add Richard Strauss's luscious but fatalistic song, Im Abendrot (At Sunset), over this sequence.

The performances are all done well. A little more lisp from Garrel's Godard perhaps, but really, technically and the overall production, the whole movie looks just right.

Well worth the time and a reminder that once films, and cinema generally, actually mattered socially and politically.

Godard may have been one of the French New Wave's main stars but, as a person, he could be repulsive without trying. Not that the film portrays him as overly selfish or self-centered, but he seems to live in his own mind, and have standards that he switches at his own convenience.

As the film opens, he is 37 and he has just started a romantic involvement with 19 year old exquisitely beautiful wife to be Anne (solidly played by Stacy Martin, who looks very much like Catherine Deneuve at the height of her splendor, only better) . Given that the film is mostly told from Anne's point of view, we get to see Godard's steady mental disintegration and growing loss of touch with reality, as told from her standpoint, while all along she keeps retiring into an observer's position. In light of the fact that the film is based on Anne Wiazemsky's autobiographical account of her relationship with Godard, she emerges from this film with her image apparently far more intact - but also as a bit of a tell-tale who thinks nothing of reducing her former husband's reputation to the lowest possible level.

Physically, Louis Garrel looks like Godard, imitates his famous lisp very well, and his performance is superb, even if the character does nothing to encourage anyone's sympathy, let alone liking. The way he joins the student demonstrations of May 1968, but flees police as soon as he feels that he is in danger; and the way he bends Maoist doctrine to his own take on life, says much about the pitfalls of this once and briefly great director.

Michel Hazanavicius' direction is first class, his screenplay not really. The submarine, Le Redoutable, and the repeatedly broken spectacles are jokes that have worn rather thin by film's end.

Soundtrack is generally vivid and brings back the day, including some lovely music, but there is also some jarring noise, typical of what made Godard so unique in films like MASCULINE FEMININE, A BOUT DE SOUFFLE, LE MÉPRIS.

Ultimately, it is a movie for lovers of the French cinema. I am one, and I am grateful for what I learned from it. That said, LE REDOUTABLE/GODARD MON AMOUR makes for some rather uncomfortable viewing because of Godard's disintegration. On the other hand, thank God Stacy Martin is so beautiful, with her around I can forgive any flaws in the movie.

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?)

First, I can't think of any other film that treats the life of a director, except for Greenaway's Eisenstein In Guanajuato, and the far better known Chaplin. To have his life immortalized this way, a director would have to be a really fascinating person, and I doubt Godard is.

Second, we see how terribly self-absorbed he is throughout. He seems not to care for any of the people around him. The scene in the restaurant when he insults the old man and his wife should have ended in a fist fight, but cooler heads prevailed. Anne wants to make a film with Marco Ferreri--it will be her eleventh--but Godard objects violently: there's too much nudity. This is his wife who will be seen naked, and he forces Ferreri to shoot her with clothes on. Louis Garrel is especially fine in this scene, while Stacy Martin turns in a performance of some skill which makes me forget about the awful film she did with von Trier.

The best for last: about one hour into the story, we get Godard, Anne, the Bambans, Michel Cournot and the driver packed into a car headed to Paris (they'd have gone by train, but for the general strike). Cournot is down because his first and only film hasn't been shown at Cannes, Godard throws some gratuitous insults at him, and the Bambans join in. It's the ultimate bad car trip.

LE REDOUTABLE , Michel Hazanavicius, In Competition at Cannes 2017. The French title refers to a formidable opponent which seems very appropriate considering who this story is about. image2.jpeg This films comes here with high expectations because the subject of the film is Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the most famous and surely the most controversial French film director of the XX. century and until now nobody has ventured or dared to make a biopic about the cantankerous 86 year old cinéaste.

Michel Havanacius, director of the 2011 Oscar winning film The Artist has now taken that step and cast popular fast rising actor Louis Garrel as his Godard. The picture focuses on the making of La Chinoise in 1967 which was a major turning point in Godard's career and featured young actress Anne Wiazemsky whom Godard married after the making of that film. He was then 36 and she was nineteen. It was a stormy marriage following his first marriage to another of his stars, Anna Karina, and only lasted two years when Godard was at the peak of his fame and also the acme of his unbridled arrogance ...which is emphatically presented throughout. The film is basically a study of the collapse of that marriage and Godard's embracing of Maoist revolutionary politics which completely altered his career trajectory and sharply divided his fan base while destroying his marriage as well. Hazanavicius most successfully captures the atmosphere of the time and the year that this Cannes film festival was closed down by Godard and other New Wavers as a protest against the oppression of the government of Degaulle. He also captures the purposeful naughtiness of Godard films by throwing in female and female frontal nudity arbitrarily, clearly meant as a sly comment rather than a titillation. Other Godardian devices such as obscene graffiti and inter-titles and jump cuts add to the nouvelle vague flavor. Wiazemsky is effectively played played by actress Stacy Martin who was featured alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg in Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac a few years back. Louis Garrel was a good choice to impersonate Godard and turns in a commendable job even if it is more of an impersonation than entering the skin of his subject -- which, considering the type of slippery personality Godard actually is, would be an almost impossible job.

This is overall a rather light and breezy treatment of what could have been a very knotty and heavy handed film in less skillful hands. Hazanavicius has the right touch for this touchy subject Jean-Luc himself has called the film "a stupid, stupid, idea" -- one would hardly expect him to call any film about himself anything else. For Nouvelle Vague and Godard buffs this film is essential "reading".