Éloge de l'amour

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!

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'.

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.

In 1961, Jean-Luc Godard directed Une femme est une femme; a full colour pastiche of the contemporary relationship foibles of a troubled young couple at the heart of swinging-sixties Paris. Starring Godard's own former wife and muse Anna Karina in the lead role, it saw the filmmaker at his most joyous and creative; resulting in a finished film that was not only 'in praise of love', but very much in love with its characters and the presentation of the film itself. Forty years on however and Godard found himself looking once again at the subject of love with Éloge de l'amour (2001), a film that claims to be 'In Praise of Love', but is actually quite the opposite.

Presenting a melancholic view of love that is as bewildering as the emotion itself, Éloge de l'amour opens in a monochromatic Paris that brings to mind the beauty and grandeur of Godard earlier classics, such as À bout de soufflé (1959) and Bande à part (1964). Enticing it's viewers into a world of jarring contradictions, a varied selection of characterless characters who shuffle through the streets like empty vessels dying without soul, and some of the most intense uses of cinematic composition ever seen; 'Éloge de l'amour' successfully draws us into a labyrinthine underground of dreams, thoughts, desires and hopes; never quite sure where one ends and one begins. Here, we are constantly being forced to look at the film more closely than we normally would, searching for some kind of clue to unlock the images and scenes that are being offered to us, in a way that manages to reference the full spectrum of Godard's work; from the aforementioned romanticism of Une femme est une femme, through to the Brechtian-like alienation techniques of Week End (1967), and on to the blending of the two with Slow Motion (1980).

Being Godard of course, the film also throws us some political ideology and some valid arguments against Hollywood film-making and its strangle-hold like monopoly on the idea of what cinema really is. Those raised outside of the US will no doubt agree with Godard's allusions to Hollywood re-writing history to serve as entertainment, as we grow up in a world where films like The Patriot (2000), Braveheart (1995), Titanic (1997) and Pearl Harbour (2001) are becoming educational tools to a generation who derive little pleasure from reading books or researching history. Godard understands the importance of historical accuracy in cinema and makes the points clear (one scene in particular stands out; a scene in which an elderly man and a young couple stand outside a cinema, the old man looking at the publicity poster for Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, whist the young couple completely ignore it, more interested in an advert for The Matrix). Is Godard trying to suggest that an ignorant youth will someday slowly discard what has come before? Or is he simply showing us the cinematic climate as it is now? Éloge de l'amour is never relaxed in its messages; sometimes bordering on the same kind of inconstant ranting that for many destroyed the intensity of a film like Week End. Yet Godard curiously restrains himself here, and, with the last thirty-minutes of the film, makes his attack clearer, and more concise.

Photographed in vibrantly coloured digital-video, over-saturated and manipulated, the end of the film seems much more human in comparison to the cold, black and white "pure cinema" appeal of the first hour. The focus of this segment is people; elderly people for that matter, at odds with a world and culture they no longer understand. The gesture here is touching, not only because of the way its shot and acted, but because it draws a beautiful parallel with the now seventy-something Godard's own thoughts and ruminations on life. Éloge de l'amour is certainly not easy going; it's uncompromising, jarring, distant, elusive, alienating and for the most part, hard to follow. It has a bleak and broken down view of life which creates a sour undercurrent to the optimism of the title. This is not a film that praises love; this is a film that is trying to come to terms with love in a society and culture that is slowly bastardising the word into something devoid of deeper meaning, and searching for that meaning on a horizon filled with broken vessels and broken dreams. No matter what your opinion of him, Godard has, with this film, created a cinematic dream that requires the viewer to invest some time and thought into the experience.

Think of the significance of the interspersed black screens, the recurrence of the title caption, and what is achieved with the switch from monochrome stock to colour video. These are all just part of a single interpretation, but there is a joy that comes from looking at a film and being challenged to think about it. Éloge de l'amour is a film that never quite makes sense and is often hard to watch, but you thank god for its existence. Whether you see Godard as a filmmaker passed his peak and nearing the end, or whether you believe that with this film he is working up to something bigger and better - something that will bring back the magic of his early works - you can rejoice in the fact that Éloge de l'amour is every bit as intelligent, challenging, thoughtful and emotional as anything he created before.

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.