Arts & Events

At SF's Embarcadero Cinema

Godard Mon Amour is a Left Bank RomCom about the iconic French "New Wave" director and his teenage paramour. The plot in a nutshell: Jean-Luc Godard (embodied by Louis Garrel) casts Anne Wiazemsky (French actress Stacey Martin) in one of his films and winds up marrying his 17-year-old star. Over the course of their 12 years of marriage, the couple collaborates in some of Godard's best-known films (La Chinoise, Weekend). But as Godard evolves, Anne resolves, and the marriage dissolves.

It's easy to see why Godard would fall for Wiazemsky. She was smart, irresistibly cute, and totally devoted to the director. But devotion can take you only so far.

 

In real life, Wiazemsky was both an alluring actress and a prize-winning author. Her novel, "A Handful of People," won the French Academy's grand prize. She also wrote two books about her life with Godard, which became the basis for Michel Hazanavicius' new film. (Writer-director Hazanavicius—the comic genius behind a 2006 James Bond send-up, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies—is best known for his 2011 Academy Award-winning film, The Artist.) 

Like the marriage it explores, Godard Mon Amour starts out in love with Godard. But, as Wiazemsky chronicles in her books, Godard's rebel charm slowly began to erode as he became increasingly estranged from everything he deemed unworthy of his attention—even those closest to him. 

At first, we share Godard's impatience when he is approached by gushing young admirers but, eventually, his distain for anyone who worships him as a "Leftist celebrity" becomes so toxic that we wince as he assaults his innocent admirers with savage, heart-wounding insults. 

When it comes to the Sixties Revolution (1967-68), Godard wants to be more than a cultural artifact; he wants to be a leading actor. So he joins the students in the streets of Paris, furiously hurling rocks and insults at the police. 

But no matter how loud the insults, the instant the police step forward and reach for their clubs, the bluster of the student mobs turns from bravado to frantic scattering. With volleys of tear gas nipping at their heels, the yapping bulldogs of the Revolution are transformed into a mass of frantic rabbits racing for an exit. Godard included. 

There's a running joke (literally) involving Godard and his glasses. Whenever Godard takes off running during street battles between the students and les flics, he tends to lose his spectacles and, more often than not, winds up stepping on them. 

Godard once famously (and ambiguously) declared "tracking shots are a question of morality" and, in his film, Weekend, he created one of the most astonishing and revered tacking shots in film history, a seamless, seven-plus minute panning shot known as "The Traffic Jam Sequence." If you have never seen it (and if you have the time), take a look below. 

Jean-Luc Godard - Weekend, The Traffic Jam Sequence from Blue Heron on Vimeo. 

So any film about Godard has got to have tracking shots and Hazanavicius doesn't disappoint. 

There's a wonderful tracking shot as the camera follows Jean-Luc, Anne, and two friends power-walking down a street in Paris where every wall that they pass is painted with revolutionary slogans. (Unfortunately, these are not subtitled: It would have been too much of a burden since the bottom of the screen is already filled with transcripts of the characters' bickering chatter, complaints, and counter-arguments.) 

In another homage to Godard, Hazanavicius introduces some wild acts of cinematic outlawry. Late in the film, as Jean-Luc and Anne have become increasingly polarized, their scenes suddenly shift from color to black and white. And then the black and white images also reverse, so its like looking at a scene preserved on 35mm Kodak Panchromatic Tri-X 400 negative stock. 

Also worth noting is Hazanavicius easy-going manner with full-frontal nudity. Both leads bare all for the camera and there are not one, but two, examples of male hardware on display. How French! Comme c'est délicieux!  

And there's another revolutionary bit of film anarchy that comes in a scene where Jean-Luc and Anne are verbally sparing in their kitchen. On the screen below, two sets of color-coded subtitles appear simultaneously. One set records what the characters are saying while the other reveals what they are thinking. It's a dazzling idea that would likely have delighted Godard, the contentious and convention-breaking contrarian. 

In the film, Godard seeks out opportunities to inflame the revolution by addressing public gatherings. At first, he is hailed as a cultural hero. But the more he preaches, the more the younger generation dismisses him as irrelevant, or worse, counterrevolutionary.  

Godard becomes so obsessed with rebellion-on-his-terms that he winds up alienating everyone. He becomes (to a somewhat mixed comic effect) a totally insufferable presence—what the French might call une piqûre aboslute. 

Instead of challenging him, Anne tolerates Jean-Luc's growing obsessions while quietly seething at his behavior. By the end of the film, Anne has gone off to shoot a film with a rival director while Jean-Luc embarks on a "revolutionary" experiment in which a small group of artists attempts to create a film without a director. (A "director"? Such an out-dated, bourgeois concept!) 

Godard Mon Amour ends with an enactment of the Godard's ill-fated attempt to midwife a new collective model of "revolutionary" cinema. Gathered on a beach, to discuss issues of casting and direction, the collective challenges Godard's suggestions. Faced with an actual artistic rebellion, Goddard explodes, telling his compatriots that his ideas should be honored because "I know more than you!" 

Ultimately, this is comedy with a sad and sour note. Well worth watching, but if you're looking for a film that puts Godard on a pedestal, well, you're out of Luc.