"In Praise of Love"

The critics are wrong: Jean-Luc Godard has absolutely nothing left to say -- and this passionless phony comeback proves it.

By Charles Taylor

Sep 6, 2002 | Some years ago a friend of mine said that the people who claimed that the new Jean-Luc Godard movie was a return to form were exactly the same people who claimed every new Dylan album was as good as his '60s work. Well, Dylan has been making terrific records again for the past 10 years. What's Godard's excuse?

Critics have sounded the "Godard is back" drumbeat every few years since the director slammed the door on commercial filmmaking with 1967's "Weekend," the last of the 15 movies he had made since his 1959 debut, "Breathless." This happened in 1972 for "Tout Va Bien" and in 1975 for "Numéro Deux." It happened in 1980 for "Every Man for Himself" and in 1984 for "First Name: Carmen." It happened in 1990 for "Nouvelle Vague," and now it's happening again for his latest film, "In Praise of Love." Ever since it played at last year's Cannes and New York film festivals, the advance word on "In Praise of Love" has been that it's Godard's most accessible/tender/mature/insert eternally hopeful adjective here film in years. Now 72, Godard is being acclaimed for an autumnal '68 Comeback Special.

In some critical circles there's been a growing belief that Godard's post-"Weekend" work is just as vital, if not superior, to his initial '60s burst. But anyone who's been lured to any of his "comebacks" and been disappointed can be forgiven for being suspicious. The question to be asked of the laudatory word from Cannes and New York is, Can 50 Godard fans be wrong? And the unfortunate answer is yes.

"In Praise of Love" is the work of an exhausted, desiccated talent who can't get out of his own way. Godard's artistic deterioration has been particularly heartbreaking because, as his sensibility has atrophied, his visual gifts have matured. The primary colors of his '60s films, derived from movie posters and advertising and the era's graphic design, gave way, in movies like "Detective" and especially "First Name: Carmen" (on which he reunited with Raoul Coutard, who shot most of the director's '60s work), to a deep, rich burnished glow that could have been derived from the old masters. The burnish of the images in "First Name: Carmen," combined with the flow Godard shows in the editing rhythms and in the use of Beethoven string quartets to underscore the images, can lull you into thinking that something is actually going on in the film. Clearly, Godard's rejection of pop is for the director some sort of reaching for the solace and depth of classical culture.

What it adds up to, though, in "In Praise of Love" as in the films that have preceded it, is a retreat, a shutting out of the world. In "Carmen," Godard made fun of being out of sync, casting himself as a washed-up shambling wreck of a movie director named "Uncle Jean." "In Praise of Love" is just the sort of movie you might expect from that self-loathing caricature.

As far as I can tell, the first half of the film, in black-and-white and set in Paris, deals with the attempts of a young director (Bruno Putzulu) to make a movie on what he calls "the four stages of love ... meeting, attraction, separation, reconciliation." In the second half, taking place two and a half years before, set in Brittany and shot in color-drenched digital video (some of it striking, some looking like the cover of the great lost Yes album), the director is interviewing figures from the French resistance as preparation for writing a cantata based on the life and work of Simone Weil.

The confusion about what's happening has nothing to do with the elliptical narrative. Godard has always referred to himself, rightly, as more an essayist than a storyteller. But even if you're used to his methods, the episodic structure, the constant intrusion of references and graphics designed to make a quick point, the alienation techniques, "In Praise of Love" is damn near impossible to follow. And the reason, I think, is that the people in Godard's films have ceased to function for him as actors or even personalities, ceased to be anything more than his mouthpieces.

There is none of the torment and adoration with which he looked at his then wife Anna Karina in the series of films they made together. Nothing like the distanced affection he showed for the vitality and emptiness of the young people played by Jean-Pierre Léaud and Chantal Goya, or for the young revolutionaries in "La Chinoise." I've seen "In Praise of Love" twice now and both times it took me a while to distinguish between the actor playing the director and the one playing his assistant.

Godard is not entirely dead to faces. In the film's first half, there's a cut from an old woman talking about the burden that time is for the elderly to a young woman alone on a bench in the Paris evening, the lights of the city blurred behind her. That shot, and another of a young homeless couple dossing down for the night in a doorway, show traces of photographers Brassaï or Cartier-Bresson. The random shots of Parisians that dot the film suggest that, if he had the will, Godard might be the movies' great poet of urban alienation. Yet if you compare these shots to what Michael Almereyda has already achieved along those lines in "Nadja" and "Hamlet," they evaporate because, unlike Almereyda's work, they are not tied to anything, not supported by the surrounding movie.

So what is Godard's concern here? The evil of America, the long reach of cultural imperialism and the particular way that is reflected in the rot of Hollywood. It may be that Sept. 11 delayed "In Praise of Love" from being released in time to capitalize on the acclaim it received at the Cannes and New York festivals last year. And rejecting what the movie has to say may rouse Godard's partisans to claim that American insularity and xenophobia are behind the rejection. Any American critic who criticizes a film critical of America is letting himself in for accusations about America's inability to comprehend other cultures. (I'm just waiting for the letters.) But when even J. Hoberman in the Village Voice refers to the film's anti-Americanism as "callow" (as he did last fall), something is up.

Next Page: Godard's passion for making movies is gone; all that's left are his "ideas"

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