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By PAUL BRENNER
Touted in 2001 as master
director and world class provocateur Jean-Luc
Godard's comeback film (although Godard never
really went away -- only his "North American"
audience and art film distributors), "In Praise of
Love" finally, after a long two year wait, makes
it to DVD in this under-the-radar release from New
Yorker Video. Upon the film's original release,
many "North American" critics (J. Hoberman and
Roger Ebert among them) took Godard to task for
his film's anti-American outbursts. Coming off the
Bush post 9/11 rhetoric, the critical
establishment may have caved into Bush's "callow"
(a word cited by U.S. critics to describe Godard's
stance in the film) patriotic call to rally around
Haliburton. But from this reviewer's perspective,
"In Praise of Love" is anything but callow. If
anything, it stands as one of Godard's most dense,
beautiful and melancholy films.
In "First Name: Carmen," Godard plays himself as a
washed up, seedy, boom box-toting film director
and at first "In Praise of Love" looks like the
type of film that might have resulted from this
cynical, rancid perspective of Uncle Jean-Luc. At
many points in "In Praise of Love," Godard
utilizes his characters as channels for his rants
against Steven Spielberg, the profit margin on
"Titanic," and the brainwashing of children to
love "The Matrix."
But the film is much more than Godard's
foaming-at-the-mouth rants. As with every film
Godard has made since "Weekend," the film is more
of a film essay than a narrative and his rants are
merely a part of the whole, which concerns the
skewed perspectives of history and memory, both
personal and cultural. Godard's tarnished memories
are reflected in the framing device of a man
flipping through a journal of blank pages and the
repeated closing line of the film -- "Maybe
nothing was said."
To further confound and validate detractors, the
film is structured in a skewed form both
stylistically and structurally. The first
two-thirds of the film is shot in black-and-white
and charts the collapse of a film project having
something to do with either the French resistance
during World War II or, ostensibly, the four
stages of love. Most of this section is the
antithesis of Godard's brightly lit Paris scenes
from his 60s classics; here Godard's Paris is shot
mostly at night with the city lights reflecting
back upon themselves, swallowed up by the shadows.
The final third is shot on digital video and
occurs "two years earlier." This section concerns
two elderly French resistance fighters who "sold
their memories to Hollywood," their reflections
having been "acquired by Spielberg Associates." In
this section, the DVD colors resemble a Pat O'
Neill experimental film, the colors crying and
melting into one another.
Together, Godard musters the two sections into a
stark meditation on the effects of memory and
historical shortsightedness due to the influence
of world wide consumer culture -- a culture
embodied by the U.S. and Hollywood. To Godard, the
quick and instantaneous demand of the shallow cult
of technology and Hollywood negates memory and
history. As one character remarks, Americans "have
no real past, their machines do, but they have
none personally. So they buy the past of others."
Instant access to a manufactured past results in a
meaningless present and a hopeless future. And for
this Godard despairs, for the results of this
death of history are all around to seen but the
effort has become too much and too difficult for
people to make the connection: "Things are right
in front of us. Why make them up?" This is a sad
admission to make from one of the men responsible
for drawing attention to the glories of Hollywood
films. Hollywood has now become not only
intrusively irrelevant, but intrusively evil.
Given the complexities of the film (which requires
multiple viewings), "In Praise of Love" doesn't
seem to require special features to supplement the
viewing. New Yorker Video concurs: all that is
offered is the U.S. theatrical trailer. The film
is subtitled in English and is in Dolby 2.0. |
