Éloge de l'amour

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.

History. Hollywood and Americans (but which Americans? The ones without history who buy others' images, the ones between Mexico and Canada). Adulthood (which doesn't exist). Resistance and WWII. Cinema. Spielberg, Schindler. Balzac (but briefly). Simone Weil. The Matrix (dubbed into Breton, please!). The English. Nude scenes in films. Grandparents. The past, self and memory. What could be finer than a JLG romp through the modern world? It starts with B&W stock and ends in saturated video and imposed montage. It has texts, quotations, historical anecdotes, book covers; and hence is in itself eminently quotable. There can be no resistance without memory or universalism. Isn't it strange how history has been replaced by technology? But why politics by gospel? The Church is in step with time. The truth may turn out to be sad. Every thought should recall the debris of a smile.

Vaguely didactic, this film left me slightly worried about JLG's intensity as an artist of ideas. There's signs of the onset of scattered carelessness, of not being bothered with the unity or expressive power of ideas. And unity is what JLG's extraordinarily broad canvas has always been about. It's still hallmark JLG — no other director can get away with such a bold and direct transcription of ideas onto film. I was channel surfing of an evening and came across spare B&W dialogues about artists and projects and literature. I thought, This could only be by a New Wave director. There's the standard multiplicity, or what I like to call the trialogue of his style: dissociated, cut-up or multileveled/multilingual dialogue layered onto diverse semantic images, sometimes doubled images or of varied media, mixed with natural sound, musical refrains, interjections. Text, sound, image — usually concordant, sometimes broadly dissonant and multivalent, sometimes silent. But always thinking, writing, philosophizing. A poetry of three media; a tricolour meditation. And, as always, things, ideas and events shift subtly in meaning in the JLG cinema, in the space of thought, the crossed trialogue, the unreality of the mind — a train deliberately honking past an ambling reader is somehow neither intrusive nor uncontrolled; there's a sense of pre-ironic structuralism maybe (from studies in ethnology), of images stripped of semantics and signs, to toss jargon in a way unfair to a film decidedly a-theoretical. But when a character turns and says, When did the gaze collapse? and the dialogue becomes one about TV's precedence over life (I feel our gaze has become a program under control. Subsidised. The image, Sir, alone capable of denying nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us. (I hope not, says another)), then you're in very close and delicate (as narrative) thought space. Something close to mere ideas, or ideas only, stripped of coherent context. There's also a background insinuation of deeper melancholy or near futility; of the difficulty of making a difference through signs and words, of fatigue or exhaustion with the world and ideas; as though JLG no longer wills the poetry from the image or desires its latent mystery. Whether or not this functions as a critical element of the film re: modern media, I dunno. The worry lies in resultant projects that are mere thought files set to image and music.

The film seems to be stitched together with quotes. Let feelings bring about events, not the contrary. Be sure to exhaust what can be communicated by stillness and silence. (Bresson) What bothers me is not success or failure. It's the reams and reams written about it... Why bother saying or writing that Titanic is a global success? Talk about its contents. Talk about things. But don't talk around things. Let's talk on the basis of things... They're confusing life with existence, treating life like a whore which they can use to improve their existence. The extraordinary to improve the ordinary. One can enjoy existence, but not life...

All in all, I can't say this is satisfying cinema like Two or Three Things I know About Her or Masculin, féminin, and there's almost zero performance quality in this — just bland faces reading (not acting) mildly philosophical lines (these characters are not even objects, let alone subjects). Neither has it the shouted intensity and layered brain work of Hélas Pour Moi. Eloge is not a plot less anti-story but something nearly a-storical that retains elements of meta narrative (disquisitions on tragedy etc). A lack of emotional integration or joyous inwardness, offset by tired, late-night images reaching for poetry and finding very little (the most suggestive scenes were the empty train sheds). And not as much sharp humour as could be: the Americans get the occasional barb, but they're mild, easy stings. Not a consistently questioning essay nor an intensely located setting for ideas and disquisition, nor an acting out thereof, this is largely a struggle to define the late arrival and realisation of History in terms that are opposed to cinema and culture (the yanks with their contracts and fat thoughtless dollars, the exploitation of historical verité, the End of Cinema etc). Sporadic without rambling, unreal whilst actuating thought (the intrepid manufacture of ideas), I yearned for the guerrilla-intensity of hardcore JLG. He's still one of the primary artistic models, and I love his head space, but...

Rino Breebaart

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'.

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.

Edgar is a director trying to pull together a project around the subject of love. While drawing it up the author meets a young woman he once knew very well and he spends time with her again while jumping through the various funding and organisational hoops. In the second part of the film we skip backwards two years to the point where the author originally met the woman. At this point in his life he is representing Hollywood and is in the process of purchasing the rights to the story of the girl's grandparents, who ere in the resistance during the majority of World War II.

There's one thing to be said for Godard and that's that you can be fairly confident he isn't going to be directing the next Harry Potter film as this 2001 movie shows he is as difficult and rewarding as he could be. The first half of the film is in black and white, while the second is in blistering digital colour. If my plot summary suggests a total cohesion then forget it – the suggested connection with a romance is more from my summary than the actual film. Instead what we have is free flowing dialogue that covers issues around America, art, love, age, humanity and so on – it is difficult to get into but it is worth trying. The dialogue is rather pretentious and too 'deep' to be natural or realistic but it still engages the brain in a way that kept me interested even if I struggled to get into narrative or characters, or to really agree with much of what was being said. I say it is worth trying but I would suggest that this makes it a weak film by the standards of more linear films and should be seen as more of an experience than a story or 'normal' film.

Matching this, the direction is both hypnotic and off-putting. Shots are framed in very arty ways with the characters in shadow, out of focus, out of shot etc for much of the film; the b&w section is crisp and feels older than it is, while the colour section is startling in its intensity. Again all this has the dual effect of coming across as rather pretentious and overly arty but then also being interesting enough and imaginative enough to keep you watching. Of course many audiences will be put off, and rightly so because not even once does this film take a step towards the audience to help us out – instead it pitches its tent and simply says that we can take it or leave it. In my own 'difficult' style, I managed to do both and found the film as frustrating and alienating as I did interesting and involving. The cast are hard to judge because they are rather stilted and cold throughout, but none of them really give anything that could be described as a poor performance.

Overall this is a strange film and one that is worth a try and worth sticking at for what it does well. However this is not as simple as it should have been and the film does very little to help the audience keep involved and interested. Visually it is true art-house stuff but yet is also great to look at – starkly beautiful or weirdly colourful; meanwhile the dialogue is unnatural and pretentious but yet still interesting and thoughtful. A strange mix but one that is worth a try.