Godard Mon Amour
In “Godard Mon Amour,” writer-director Michel Hazanavicius takes everything great about the French director Jean-Luc Godard and uses it to explain everything that’s wrong with him. Like the best of Godard’s own work, this new movie has the humor and briskness of a comedy, while telling a serious story of an artist’s self-delusion and decline.
Hazanavicius is not a household name in the United States, but his silent movie, “The Artist,” won the best picture Oscar for 2011. Done in the style of the 1920s, “The Artist” was so specific in its details that it didn’t look like some generic silent film, but like something Paramount might have made circa 1927.
“Godard Mon Amour” pays a similar attention to detail. In color, style and humor — even in its graphics and editing — it’s very much like a Godard film from the mid-1960s. Thus, the experience is like watching an actual Godard film — the first great Godard film since “Masculin Féminin” in 1966. Alas, the real Godard has made many movies in the decades since, but he has never been able to match or even approach the quality of his output in the first years of the 1960s. “Godard Mon Amour” goes some distance toward explaining why that’s the case.
Based on the memoir by Godard’s ex-wife, Anne Wiazemsky, “Godard Mon Amour” takes place during the first year of their marriage, when the director was having an artistic crisis, one aggravated by his adoption of radical politics. At the start of the film, the young wife — only 20 when the marriage began — idolizes her 36-yearold husband, who is recognized everywhere as one of the most brilliant and innovative film directors in the world. But gradually, through Stacy Martin’s quietly reactive performance, we see doubt enter her eyes, then disillusionment and then frustration and anger.
Godard is played by French matinee idol Louis Garrel, but here he changes his look and manner. His hair is thinned out, and he adopts Godard’s distinctive lisp, though Garrel exaggerates it a bit. Garrel’s blank-faced cool is subtly transformed into an introverted paranoid gaze. He presents a man who considers himself on the cutting edge of the coming revolution, and thus, he has no respect for his friends’ films or even his own previous work, which includes classics such as “Breathless,” “My Life to Live” and “Contempt.”
Yet despite his almost obsessive commitment, it doesn’t take long to realize that Godard’s politics are ridiculous, grounded more in an emotional need to be accepted by young revolutionaries than in any thought. Godard may think he’s being chic when he identifies anything he doesn’t like as fascist (“Advertising is fascism”), but he becomes flummoxed when a journalist asks him, “What is fascism?” He counts himself a Maoist and resolves to make “Maoist cinema,” but when he shows his latest film, “La Chinoise,” at a festival, even the festival organizer falls asleep.
A consistently funny feature of “Godard Mon Amour” is found in scenes in which Godard seeks acceptance by radicals and ends up making a fool of himself, either for seeming like what he is, a poseur who was born wealthy, or for making idiotic pronouncements such as “The Jews have become Nazis.” The radicals, almost as deluded as he is, are the only ones willing to tell him what an idiot he has become. His friends, meanwhile, tolerate him when he berates strangers in restaurants or sagely announces that Jean Renoir’s films were “bourgeois.”
“Godard Mon Amour” is refreshing in its presentation of bullying political correctness as a dead end, intellectually and artistically. Yet even more arresting are the film’s insights into Godard. At one point, Godard bemoans his age and indicates that he wishes he could fit in more with the young. Perhaps, the movie suggests subtly, Godard’s early work was tied, in some way, to youthful exuberance, and he sensed that his inspiration was waning. Thus, his attraction to a movement he associated with youth.
Hazanavicius’ irreverence toward a living icon is unexpected, but appropriate. Yet the movie also pays tribute to Godard by imitating the loose playfulness of his early work. At one point, Godard and Anne are undressing as they discuss whether nudity is ever warranted onscreen. Garrel and Martin perform the scene while completely naked. It’s the kind of daring, fourthwall-breaking joke Godard himself might have made, and it puts you in the mood to revisit Godard at his best.