In Praise of Love

by
Josh Timmermann

Whether you love him, hate him, or simply don't get him, Jean-Luc Godard is undeniably one of the key figures in shaping the last half-century of world cinema. Few artists - working in any medium- have produced a body of work so deeply personal, intellectually demanding, and consistently experimental. Godard's films are intimidating and difficult, to be sure, but are also infallibly rewarding, haunting, and poetic.

In these respects, Godard's new film, In Praise of Love, is certainly no exception. The film's central character, Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), is an artist of sorts, developing a rather vague new project - for all we know, it could be a film, a play, or a novel. It concerns the four stages of love ("the meeting, the physical passion, the quarrels and separation, the reconciliation") to be played out through three couples of various ages. For the female half of the young couple, Edgar seriously considers an alluring young woman named Berthe, whom he eventually realizes he had met two years earlier in Brittany. (We see this meeting in the film's second section, an extended epilogue, set in the past and shot on eye-poppingly oversaturated video, with colors melting expressively into one another.) He later learns, however, that this woman has committed suicide, potentially leaving his project in limbo. Such is the impenetrably melancholy mood of this film - longing despairingly for love, ideas, history, and memory.

The first, much lengthier section of the film is set in the present and is shot in rich, sensuous black and white. Edgar wanders broodingly around Paris discussing his project and the plethora of philosophical queries involved. "With adults," he concludes, "nothing is obvious" - which is not the case with the more clear and defined states of youth and old age. Godard also seems to equate this curious point with America. Founded on ideals and promises that, in many cases, it has failed to live up to, the nation has itself become another faceless state, which is "the antithesis of the loved one, whose role negates the sovereign value of love...The state has not, or has lost, the power to embrace the world in its totality."

In Praise of Love also offers condemning evidence against Hollywood cinema, which, in its "youth," greatly influenced Godard's own films. He now, however, views its inability to deal properly with such massively important world events as World War II and the Holocaust, as evidence of its having skipped over the vital stage of adulthood, thus descending, unprepared, into the senility of old age. "We need the three ages, you see. Or else the project is dead. It becomes a story with Julia Roberts…Hollywood," Edgar sighs, "not history." In particular, Godard questions the motives of Steven Spielberg, whose arguably well-intentioned historical films have, nonetheless, inadvertently replaced our collective cultural "memories" of the events they center on, and essentially fictionalize.

In one of the film's most provocatively vitriolic lines Edgar declares that, "It's not whether man will endure but whether he has the right to." But the line is spoken with such sadness and disappointment that we, at once, can understand why this film is an "elegy for love" (Éloge de l'amour).

Godard's films have an uncanny, almost singular knack for making most of their contemporaries seem irrelevant and empty in comparison. Indeed, In Praise of Love feels so immediately essential that most of the other films I've seen recently strike me as, at best, passable escapism, and, at worst, altogether superfluous. Godard's principle dedication has always been to exploring just how we as an audience interact, aesthetically and cerebrally, with the films we view. Somehow, however, he has avoided making films that feel clinical or like purely technical exercises. His body of work is as alive and vital and exciting as any in the history of cinema. In Praise of Love is a superb addition to Godard's unequivocally iconoclastic oeuvre, and perhaps even one of his finest films to date.


©2002 Josh Timmermann
CineScene