Godard, Mon Amour (2017): He Deserves Better

Godard, Mon Amour, the new movie by Oscar winning writer/director Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist [2011]), is about a remarkable period in the life of a remarkable man – Jean-Luc Godard.

You don’t have to be a cineaste to be interested in a film about a great film director, just as you don’t need to be an art enthusiast to enjoy movies about famous painters (such as the Oscar winning Pollack [2000]) or last year’s Loving Vincent); and you don’t have to know much about classical music to appreciate bio-pics about talented composers like Beethoven (1994’s Immortal Beloved) or Mozart (1984’s Amadeus).  Jean-Luc Godard, of course, is the fabled auteur-director who came to prominence as one of the leading lights of the French New Wave with Breathless, his groundbreaking (still fabulous) first feature film in 1960.  This was followed by films like Contempt (1963), Alphaville (1965), Masculin, féminin (1966), and Weekend (1967). Many of these movies were critical of bourgeois values and politics, but by the late 1960s, Godard became really radicalized and everything changed.  

1968, when much of Godard, Mon Amour is set, was a year of worldwide cultural and political tumult, not least in France. The Vietnam war was raging out of control (the Tet offensive began in January); citing the war, Lyndon Johnson declined to run for re-election; Martin Luther King was assassinated, followed by rioting in more than 100 cities; Bobby Kennedy was assassinated; the tempestuous Democratic convention in Chicago turned into a police riot; the Black Panther party was formed in Oakland, CA; and “the silent majority” elected Richard Nixonas the 37th U.S. president. In China, meanwhile, Mao’s Cultural Revolution was in full swing, with Red Guards running amok; the guerilla war known as The Troubles began in Northern Ireland; and Czechoslovakia’s hopeful Prague Spring, which began in January, was crushed when the USSR invaded the country in August.  Not coincidentally, the Rolling Stones released both Street Fighting Man and Sympathy for the Devil in 1968.

In May of that year, France exploded with revolutionary fervor. It started with university students in Paris. Soon most universities were shut down, and students took to the streets, manning barricades a lá Les Misérables, clashing with the police and the army, and calling forth the sympathies of the union workers, left-leaning musicians, celebrities, and many others. Well over a million people marched through Paris in support of, among other things, free speech, higher wages, and an end to class discrimination, and the ouster of the government of President Charles De Gaulle and Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. Work stoppages spread throughout the country and within a couple weeks two thirds of French workers were on strike, paralyzing transportation, most industry, and for a while, the government. At one point, de Gaulle reportedly left the country. The National Assembly was dissolved, and new elections were called.

In 1968, Godard was a thirty-eight-year-old international celebrity and national icon, seemingly on top of the world. But he felt dead inside - increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo, politically, professionally and personally. He left his wife (and frequent lead actress) Anna Karina, began a torrid love affair with the budding 19-year-old actress Anne Wiazemsky, renounced his previous movies as bourgeois trash, and set out to, as he put it, “make political films politically”.  

When informed of the plans to make a film about this period of his life, Godard reportedly said that it was “a stupid, stupid idea.” But I don’t know, it seems like a great story and an exciting setting for a movie, don’t you think? It is just too bad Hazanavicius has delivered such a disappointing mish-mash.  

Early in the film, Godard and Anne listen to a radio play, during which life on a submarine is described as highly constrained, full of contradictions and yet of great importance, concluding that “Such is life aboard the Redoutable.” Godard somewhat charmingly adopts this line as a domestic catchphrase encapsulating Anne’s relationship with him. Hazanavicius likes it too, so much so that the French title of the movie is Le Redoutable.  The US title translates to “Godard, My Love,” which should be fitting, as the story is based on Anne’s autobiographical “novel” Un An Apres (One Year Later), about her experience with Godard over the two years of their relationship and their involvement in the radical events of that time.

Yet one of my main complaints about the movie is how little it concerns itself with Anne’s inner life. Her voice is ignored, or more accurately lost, in translation. Instead, she’s just there - representing the great man’s dream girl, always beautiful, mostly quiet, pulled along by his sense of self-importance and his passionate embrace of the revolutionary fervor of the moment, with little regard for her needs and desires – until she finally decides to leave him. The story of a love affair disintegrating in the face of political or professional commitment might have been interesting, if the primary narrator were seen more as a person and less as an ideal or, in Hazanavicius’ rendition, a sex object. In other words, what we get is largely a male-gaze throwback – featuring the lovely face and youthful, frequently nude body of actress Stacy Martin (Nymphomaniac Vols I and II [2013]) as Anne, with scant attention paid to Anne’s feelings or thoughts. We learn little about her except that she’s very pretty and watchable.

Hazanavicius pays tribute to Godard’s filmmaking in this movie by incorporating various stylistic features associated with his classic movies: voiceover narration, chapter headings, extreme close-ups, handheld cameras, and so forth. Yet Godard does not come off well in Hazanavicius’ hands. He is at a crucial point in his life and career - hoping to become relevant again by reinventing himself - or as he sees it, reinventing cinema itself.  Godard talks about his thoughts (if not his feelings) endlessly. He agonizes over the possibility that he may have to choose between politics and making movies. The politics comes across as just ridiculous (as perhaps it was) and Godard as ridiculously out of touch, parroting the gospel according to Mao. In her introductory voiceover, Anne had described her lover Godard as “indefinable, wild, fascinating, funny, unpredictable, disconcerting, political, charming, impertinent, young, free.” What we get is an unhappy, argumentative, unrelentingly obnoxious, self-absorbed ideologue, who seems to enjoy insulting and driving away many of his friends and colleagues, and Anne as well.   

I must add that within the constraints imposed by Hazanavicius’ screenplay, French actor Louis Garrel (Bertolucci’s The Dreamers [2003]) does a wonderful, convincing job in the role of Godard. He even looks like him.

Another plus is how Godard, Mon Amour gives us an interesting, way-back-machine glimpse of the crazy days of quasi-revolutionary Paris in May 1968. Also, the picture takes on a satirical, humorous tone for the most part, which yields some funny bits. For example, in one running gag, Godard’s hallmark dark-framed spectacles repeatedly get knocked off his face and broken seemingly every time he gets involved in a political action. Another example: when Anne is considering a role in another director’s picture, which would involve multiple nude scenes, she and Jean-Luc have a lengthy discussion on the topic of when movie nudity is integral and appropriate and when it’s simply exploitive – the joke being that all the while both are walking around buck-naked on our movie screen. 

  

Still, Godard, Mon Amour is not funny enough to overcome its many weaknesses, and indeed, the jokiness undercuts whatever serious purpose Hazanavicius may have had in making this movie. For me, the takeaway is that this is a rather shallow film that doesn’t take any of its topics seriously enough: the politics, issues concerning the purposes of cinema, the parties’ romance or Anne’s point of view. Such is life aboard the Redoutable.

107 minutes  -  In French, with some English – subtitled as necessary

Grade: C+

In limited release in select theaters. Opens April 27 in the SF Bay Area at Landmark’s Embarcadero, Shattuck Theater, and Rafael Film Center.

Through the Eyes of Werner Herzog: Into The Inferno (2016) and Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016)

It is pretty universally acknowledged that Werner Herzog is a great filmmaker. He is also remarkably prolific, having directed (and mostly written, too) forty-eight feature films over the last fifty years. His nineteen narrative (fiction) features include the highly regarded Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Stroszek (1977) and Fitzcarraldo (1982); yet over the last twenty-five years, Herzog has increasingly focused his efforts on documentaries.  More than half of his twenty-nine feature-length documentaries have been produced since 1992, including Grizzly Man (2005), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) and the two films I’ll be discussing today: Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World and Into the Inferno both of which came out in 2016. (And both are now available on Netflix).

Herzog’s interests are wide and his intellect is probing. It seems he’s particularly drawn to exploring the ideas, lifestyles and aspirations that distinguish us as individuals and societies, while paradoxically highlighting our human commonality. This, of course, makes him an ideal documentarian. His two 2016 documentaries provide a nice example of this.

Into the Inferno is an exploration of the awesome power and fascination of volcanoes around the world and how their threat and mystique has affected the worldview of those who live in their shadow. The movie features jaw-dropping, stunningly gorgeous photography - often peering directly into the craters of “living” volcanoes at the brilliant, mesmerizing inferno of lava and magma at their core – a churning, orange-red sea, exploding like the surface of the sun, roaring with the force of an angry, terrible god. Herzog accompanies these images with grand religious music – Verdi’s Jesu Pie, Vivaldi’s Magnificat, Rachmaninoff’s Glory to God on High and the like, all of which feels completely appropriate.  Indeed, as the film opened with several minutes of this fabulous stuff, I was thrilled enough to grab my journal and write “Turn up the sound to your system’s (and your ears’) capacity; turn down the lights; watch on the biggest screen available!”.

In retrospect, this is still good advice. Eventually, of course, Herzog turns his interest to human beings (and one may need to drop the volume a bit). Along with his collaborator, the engaging British volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, he takes us from the tiny South Pacific archipelago nation of Vanuato to Antarctica, then to Indonesia, Ethiopia, Iceland and even to North Korea – not just to gaze at and into their volcanoes, but to try and understand the powerful effect volcanoes have had on human history and the human psyche.

For example, in the Afar region of Ethiopia, there’s the Danekil Depression, part of the Great Rift Valley, lying more than three hundred feet below sea level, and the hottest place on earth. Not far away is the great Erte Ale volcano, one of only three in the world where magma is directly expelled. Erte Ale is also notable because, over hundreds of thousands of years, it extruded vast quantities of obsidian – volcanic glass – one of the hardest substances on earth, yet so brittle and sharp that it is ideal for making primitive tools. So, this is also a place that attracted the earliest humans; and we go with Herzog and Oppenheimer to a paleontological dig, seeking fossil evidence of our earliest ancestors. Tim D White, the UC Berkeley professor in charge of the dig, is so enthusiastic that this digression becomes every bit as interesting as the “main” topic.

More important to Herzog than volcanoes themselves is the spiritual and mythic hold these terrifying, yet fascinating natural forces have had on the generations of people who living on their slopes. So, in Indonesia where Java’s Merapi volcano has erupted regularly over the years, most recently in 2010, we not only learn about the eruptions, and how the recently installed monitoring-early warning system has saved lives, but we also witness the religious rites that have grown up in the community at the base of the mountain. Incorporating ancient animism with the official muslim faith, the townspeople annually hold an elaborate, sexually tinged ceremony seeking to reconcile the goddess of the ocean with the demon of the nearby volcano, sort of an unholy marriage, which aims to placate both parties.

In Herzog’s hands, all of this – the volcanology, the paleontology, the cultural anthropology, a venture into the core of North Korea’s state controlled group-think - is fascinating and stimulating stuff.

The core inquiry of our second movie, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, is similar to that of Into the Inferno - namely, who are we and what are the forces that have shaped our understanding of the world,  but Lo and Behold takes us in a completely different direction. It is an exploration of the revolution in human affairs – some would say in human development – known as the internet. If this is less viscerally thrilling than the scary-beautiful images of roiling lava cauldrons, it is more immediately relevant to our current existence and, prospectively, to the lives of our children and our children’s children.

Herzog is no expert on the cyber world; but he’s a well-known and respected explorer of ideas and thus able to pull in those with the expertise, perspective and, in some cases, celebrity of their own to discuss where we are and muse upon where we may be going, for better or worse. Although he finds much wonder and promise in some aspects of our brave new digital world, one suspects he is not altogether a fan.

Lo And Behold is structured by breaking down the many concepts and concerns associated with the broad topic of the Internet into ten sections, each dealing with a different aspect of the subject. Perhaps the easiest way to talk about this movie it Is to use the same format. So, the movie starts at the beginning, with a chapter entitled The Early Days – a very brief introduction to the history of the Internet going back to the late 1960s and the 1970s, featuring some of the pioneers who were there at the inception, such as Leonard Kleinrock and Robert Kahn –developers of packet technology, the TCP/IP protocol and ARPANET (forerunner to the internet). It’s hard to remember now, but in those days the idea of computers working with one another over long distances was revolutionary. Kleinrock tells the story of the first ARPANET transmission, from a computer at UCLA to another one in Northern California at Stanford University. The transmission was to commence with the command ”login”.  But the Stanford computer crashed after only two letters were received – so, prophetically, the very first message transmitted on the new network was “Lo”. It’s hard to imagine a more auspicious beginning!

Chapter 2, The Glory of the Net, looks at some of the amazing things humans are doing with the help of and because of the Internet, such as advanced robotics and, in one of the more interesting stories: engaging online gamers to help solve seemingly intractable problems of molecular modeling to cure various kinds of cancer. Taking a more pessimistic view, Chapter 3,The Dark Side, looks at internet bullying, stalking and harassment.

In a bit of a sidestep, Chapter 4, Life Without the Net, introduces us to one of the few places in the world that is virtually free of the electromagnetic radiation emitted from cellphones, Wi-Fi networks, power lines and the like: Green Bank, West Virginia – a 13,000 square mile “Radio Quiet Zone”. Dozens of people who suffer from what they call electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) have flocked there to escape the headaches, nausea and other ailments they believe to be caused by the modern world’s dramatic turn to electronic communications.

The next chapter examines what could happen to our internet-dependent world if a disruptive cataclysm shuts it all down. Maybe we should say when that event occurs. In 1859, the earth experienced the effects of a massive solar flare, a “geomagnetic storm” on the surface of the sun known as the Carrington Event. Auroras typically only experienced in arctic regions (e.g. the Northern Lights) were seen as far south as the Caribbean and central Mexico; In New England, it was bright enough to read a newspaper in the dead of night. And around the world, most telegraph systems were blown out, and many telegraph operators received electroshocks. Astronomer Lucianne Walkowitz suggests that such events may recur every 200 to 300 years or so. Thus, Chapter 5 of Lo and Behold is ominously titled The End of the Net. Continuing in this gloomy vein, the 6^th chapter, Earthly Invaders, considers the dangers to military defense, governmental and other Internet – dependent systems from hacking, malware, military grade viruses, and the like.

Turning to what we might call speculative futurism, in Chapter 7, The Internet on Mars, Herzog turns to Elon Musk and his vision of establishing colonies there. The question isn’t just “Is this feasible?” but, just as importantly, “Is this desirable?” Would a Martian society of humans be any better environmentally, politically, etc. than their Earthly predecessors?  Chapter 8 looks at and is entitled Artificial Intelligence. Can we have truly intelligent robots or cyborgs? Could the internet develop some sort of consciousness? Might it have a sense of itself? What would this mean for us?

Some visionaries (or are they fools?) are imagining what they (and Chapter 9) call The Internet of Me. Wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where everything is fully (and invisibly) wired, so the network is always aware of you, attuned to your needs – knows what temperature you like, your schedule, where you left your keys, stuff like that – and always at your service via voice command? Well wouldn’t it? Can we even imagine what a generation raised in such a world might be like? Maybe we should go back and watch chapters 5 and 6 again.

Lo and Behold concludes with a short chapter called simply The Future. But let’s face it: nobody knows. Look how poorly past futurists (and most sci-fi writers) missed the boat on smart phones, the world wide web, social media, and all the other futuristic stuff that’s a part of our everyday world.

Into the Inferno runs 1 hour 44 minutes.

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World runs 1 hour 38 minutes.

Both films are available streaming and on disc from Netflix.

Lo and Behold is also available streaming on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and other streaming services.