I DON'T pretend to understand a darned thing about Jean-Luc Godard's "In Praise of Love." But I know a good thing when I see it.
I can (and did) respond passionately and positively to its passing ideas, (mostly) gorgeous black-and-white cinematography, delicate visual framing, wonderful surges of music and a worldview that elucidates the French director's thoughts and feelings about history, love, memory and American political and pop culture (which amount to the same thing here). But I can't tell you what it's "about."
Bruno Putzulu plays a movie director who wants to make a film about the four stages of love in Jean-Luc Godard's "In Praise of Love."
(Manhattan Pictures)
|
|
This movie (French title: "Eloge de l'Amour") amounts to Rorschach-test poetry, in which you absorb the film's battery of images and language, follow its purposeful, time-redistributing structure and determine not so much what you have seen or understood (what to make of two modern characters who are told to play the roles of Eglantine and Perceval?) but what you felt you saw. Godard is luckier; he knows exactly what he means to say and he does so with no attempt to spell things out or pussyfoot around.
He quotes from filmmakers Robert Bresson and John Ford and from St. Augustine, and cites French essayist Georges Bataille, philosopher Henri Bergson and the artist Degas. He reminds us that North America means Canada and Mexico, too. Quotations, aphorisms and ironies abound.
"There can be no resistance without memory. Or Universalism."
"You can't think of something without thinking about something else."
"Every thought should contain the debris of a smile."
What does this add up to? You have to find it for yourself, intellectually or instinctively. There's a plot, of sorts, one revolving around Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), a filmmaker who wants to create a film for three couples that will show the four stages of love: first meeting, passion, separation and reconciliation. Another of his creative possibilities: a cantata about Simone Weil, a French-Jewish philosopher, anarchist and religious mystic.
This initial black-and-white section shows a beautiful Paris, and it recalls Godard's earlier work in such great films as "Masculine-Feminine." One scene's particular location near the Seine is a clear nod to Jean Vigo's wonderful "L'Atalante," a love story set on a barge.
The black-and-white half of the story switches to supersaturated color video as we go from the present to two years earlier. Edgar meets with an older couple, formerly from the French Resistance, whose story could become a Hollywood movie. He also meets the couple's granddaughter (Cecile Camp), who turns out to be a woman we saw earlier -- one whom Edgar invited unsuccessfully to participate in his film.
This section is also a launching point for some of Godard's more pointed observations about the selling of truth and love, the commercialization of history and, if you will, the Spielbergization of reality. ("Schindler's List" takes a beating in this movie.)
"Americans have no real past," says a voice in the film, which amounts to Godard's Greek chorus. "They have no real memory of their own. Their machines do, but they have none personally. So they buy the past of others, especially those who resisted. Or they sell talking images. But images never talk."
You get the feeling that you have been wired directly to Godard's extremely active, tireless brain, catching all of its rhythms and passing thoughts. It's the intellectual ride of your life, as far as moviegoing goes. It's a densely layered scheme, passionately obtuse and maybe not heartfelt so much as brainfelt. But it's undeniably powerful and, if you're up for the experience, exhilarating.
IN PRAISE OF LOVE (Unrated, 98 minutes) -- Contains thematically intense material. In French with subtitles. At Visions Cinema/Bistro/Lounge.
