www.camerastylo.com
www.camerastylo.com
by Derek Lam
Everything turns, then, on whether the film is coherent in some modernist (if not traditional) sense, or whether it is not precisely some new kind of incoherence which the spectator relishes and which therefore constitutes a kind of postmodern jouissance, a reveling in loose ends, the desire called chaos or contingency. It will be observed that the critic's work is greater and more demanding in the first instance than in the second. For the first requires more active analysis, whereas the postmodern option would seem to involve little more than sitting back to watch it all hang out.
- Fredric Jameson, "High-Tech Collectives in Late Godard."
Centered, like Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There?, on the mourning of an absence (and likewise choosing to present the character's death elliptically), Jean-Luc Godard's gorgeous, heartbreaking Eloge de l'amour closed the 2001 New York Film Festival amidst controversy over both the film's alleged anti-Americanism and doubts among certain quarters as to whether closing night should be best reserved for more crowd-pleasing options like last year's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In the event, an undue emphasis on what was ultimately but one aspect of a multi-faceted work (and a misinterpreted one at that) distracted some from what was essentially a Godardian love story, told with great beauty, passion, and structural complexity. As the film's protagonist Edgar explains, with an emotionally frustrated intellectual's obfuscation and circumlocution when it comes to love: "When I wish to speak of something, I must speak of something else." (Intertitles that alternate between "De l'amour" and "Du quelque chose" make his effort at sublimation all the more tangible.)
The first part of Godard's film, lushly shot in black-and-white, deals with Edgar's attempts to mount a production – he does not know whether it will be a novel, a play, or a film – about the four ages of love. Regarding children, adolescents (a remarkably concise rehearsal scene seems to sum up the "impossible love" between Godard the artist and Karina his ideal that suffuses the director's '60s-work), and old couples, he is clear on his concept – you are either in love or you are not. But with adults, he declares, there needs to be a story – how, where, and why – and the film shows Edgar repeatedly thumbing through a notebook of empty pages. As the film offers occasional glimpses of a relationship between Edgar and a woman we initially know little about, it becomes increasingly obvious that the elusive story for adulthood might well be Edgar's own. The first part of Eloge climaxes with the off-screen suicide of the woman in question, and in a formal move designed to reflect the film's oft-intoned thesis on the importance of history and hindsight ("there will only be meaning when something is over"), the film jumps back two years in time and switches to saturated, color DV.
The second half of Eloge fills in the history Edgar seems at pains to elide or repress in the earlier portion of the film: researching along the coast of Brittany the role of Catholicism in the Resistance movement, he encounters the woman presented to us earlier in the film sans context. Referred to in the credits as an idealistic "Elle," she is the granddaughter of an elderly couple involved in the Orchestre Rouge resistance network during the Second World War. (Intriguingly, her parents – who should have been of the '68 era – are described as having committed suicide. Further reinforcement of the film’s notion of fragile idealists?) Catching glimpses of her as he interviews her grandparents, Edgar finds in her an idealistic spirit of resistance he clearly relates to. Negotiating on behalf of her grandparents with a Hollywood studio agent (representing "Spielberg and Associates") and an American government official who want to buy her grandparents' life rights for a movie on the Orchestre Rouge, she decries against what she sees as their commodification of personal history into commercial entertainment ("Tristan and Isolde," starring Juliette Binoche). Time and again, the idea of "resistance" is returned to: "resistance is impossible without memory," insists the granddaughter on the sanctity of history. Himself preparing to compose a cantata in the memory of Simone Weil, Edgar finds Elle "not particularly pretty," but falls in love with a spirit and a clearly intellectualized feminine ideal he describes as "in line with Weil and Hannah Arendt." (Could the minimal, or at least elliptical, visual representation of Elle - we never quite see her face - be a way of emphasizing her interior qualities?)
It's perhaps no coincidence that one of the conversations in the second part of Eloge de l'amour touches on Titanic. If anything, Eloge may be considered a characteristic, self-reflexive Godardian riposte to that film's pronouncedly Hollywood approach to love and history. Here, too, there is an old lady from the past on whom well-meaning researchers and commercial types alike prey, but she's hardly the ahistorical creation of a James Cameron. Barely concealing his anger at Hollywood's tendency to whitewash history, Godard suggests betrayals within the Orchestre Rouge movement that clearly still affect the couple ("Why," asks the granddaughter, "have you kept your code name of Bayard when grandfather and I have both reverted to our real names?") and that Hollywood would like to gloss over with convenient sex scenes ("Is this really what happened between you and grandpa?" she asks).
And here one might wish to comment on Godard's perceived anti-Americanism. Certainly "Elle" makes no bones about what she makes of America: in a hilarious, passionate semantic debate on the "United States of America," where countries from Mexico to Canada save the U.S. are granted legitimate histories, "Elle" accuses the Americans: "You have no history, and so you steal other people's histories." But surely the object of scrutiny here is not so much America as the arguably American, certainly postmodern, tendency to appropriate and decontextualize. Indeed the entirety of Eloge can be considered an urgent cri de coeur against postmodernism's essentially ahistorical (and to Godard, immoral) impulse. Resistance here is to forgetting, to allowing memories and personal histories to be bought and sold as "timeless" yet paradoxically ephemeral entertainment. To be sure, like all of Godard's films, Eloge is full of allusions to other works of art (literature, painting, cinema), but rather than offering them as pastiche or ironic quotations, Godard posits them as reminders of a central, living artistic tradition he clearly sees threatened by the dominating, malignant influence of commercial entertainment (the most obvious example: a poster of Pickpocket stands next to, and against, one of The Matrix). Arguing passionately against the end of history, Godard in Eloge constantly reminds his audiences of their moral obligation to remember, to resist by always contextualizing. With a typical Godardian play of language on the word "histoire" (meaning both story and history in French), the film conflates the public and the private, as it seeks to blur distinctions between personal memories and a broader sense of shared, communal history. Both are equally important to Edgar, as he finds his affair inachevée inextricably linked to histories both public and private. (When he tells one of the Hollywood agents about how her trendy coupe was invented by an ancestor, he finds himself rebuked by an aggressive "so what?" Taken aback by her active apathy, he counters: "Don't you want to know about his/story?")
And do we forget that Godard remains incurably romantic? Commentators who insist that the political arguments in Godard don't hold water merely miss the point: Godard's has always been a cinema of idealists – the children of Don Quixote – and his protagonists remain today, as always, doggedly romantic revolutionaries. Certainly in Eloge, it's characteristic that Edgar falls in love with his "not particularly pretty" object of desire precisely because of her romantic political beliefs and her noble resistance – an idealized, intellectual romance that's a far cry from the bodice-ripping, faux cross-class lay-in-the-hay between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Titanic. Breathtaking in its beauty and sadness, told in elliptical fragments that at once represent its protagonist's hidden shards of memories and thumbs its nose at Hollywood narrative conventions, Eloge is itself a stunning, moral act of resistance - a love story in defiance, like its idealistic characters, of the vacuities of irresponsible, postmodern appropriations and the collective amnesia of recycled, commercial culture. In short, a true historical romance.
All written material (c) 2002 by Derek Lam