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MODERNISM
LIVES!
by Derek Lam
"The first New York Film Festival this side of the millennium," I wrote regarding the 38th NYFF last year, "and not one traditional, happy family in sight." Well, a year after the now seemingly distant Y2K, and what can one say? As a character observes in Imamura's belated millennial statement, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge: "I had thought that things would be different, but they have turned out pretty much the same." Certainly, talent both young and old, from as far apart as France and Argentina, gave proof to Tolstoy's observation about unhappy families: La Ciénaga, Time Out, The Royal Tenenbaums, Fat Girl, Storytelling, What Time Is It There?, even the comedic Silence We're Rolling...each offered a unique perspective on domestic turmoil. And when happy families are indeed so alike: think only of the clueless mother in Va savoir or the pre-tragedy family in Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room, who can blame the filmmakers?
As has already been pointed out by some at Cannes, the same best films at the NYFF dealt with grief and mourning (Tsai Ming-Liang's latest, alongside Godard's and Oliveira's). American independents, conspicuously absent in a weak year from the 38th NYFF, returned with exceptionally strong work, even if, Todd Solondz's Storytelling apart, the mood was retroactively escapist (the enchanted, parallel New York of Wes Anderson's excellent The Royal Tenenbaums seemed, post 9/11, even more remote a fairy-tale kingdom than its creator could have ever anticipated). I can't say that I'm terribly enthusiastic about some of the other young or new talent on display this year (although I regret missing Lisandro Alonso's La Libertad, coupled on a double-bill with the Godard-approved That Old Dream That Moves), but any disappointment is tempered by the sheer sense of gratitude for the two indisputable masterpieces of NYFF 2001 – Tsai Ming-Liang's mysterious, elliptical What Time Is It There? and Godard's glorious, breathtaking Eloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love).
If the collective return at the festival of a number of erstwhile iconoclasts (Rivette, Chahine, Imamura) to relatively classical filmmaking suggested for some a way out of the postmodern impasse in cinema analogous to the contentious return to tonality in post-serialist musical compositions, the films of Tsai and Godard offered a different scenario. Explicitly challenging mainstream, received notions and insistent on breaking away from conventional modes of expression, these thorny, open-ended, decidedly un-ironic works suggested not so much a return to as a renewed faith in the spirit of modernism. Rather than accept the po-mo implication that the historical traumas and ideological ruptures central to the impetus behind modernism have all but evaporated and been replaced by a plethora of decontextualized information and simulacra of lived experience, Tsai and Godard insist that history - personal, political, cinematic, or otherwise - has never quite ended, and modernism, with its severely tested but implicit faith in humanity, never truly eclipsed by the postmodernists' amoral recycling. What Time Is It There? and Eloge de l’amour come with no Dogmatic pronouncements, but they both speak of deeply personal experiences in original, individual languages that invite the viewer to re-learn what it means to view a film as he watches and tries to make sense of what he sees. With great intellectual integrity and uncompromising stylistic rigor, these passionate, emotionally committed acts of filmmaking offer ample proof that modernist cinema is alive and well and kicking in the 21st century.
REVIEWS
by Derek Lam
When Sony Pictures Classics' Michael Barker acquired the US distribution rights to Jacques Rivette's lovely Va savoir, he made the rather extravagant claim that it was "one of the greatest films in the history of the French cinema." While the endearing comedy clearly brought out the showman (or at least the breathless fan) in Barker, it does deserve comparison with some of the Gallic masterworks he presumably was alluding to. The NYFF's blurbist cites The Rules of the Game, and that sounds about right, even if Va savoir never quite achieves the balance of gaiety and gravity (indeed, no one dies in Rivette's film) that, among other things, was a hallmark of Renoir’s achievement. Certainly common to both, though, are a generosity of spirit, reflected in the willingness to embrace characters despite their most unforgivable flaws, and an abiding good humor that views life, no matter how dark or dangerous it becomes, as essentially comic. Both draw inspiration from the theatrical world (Rivette himself cites as a model Renoir's The Golden Coach) and plays like The Marriage of Figaro, which makes it no surprise that characters in the Rivette film stay in a hotel named Beaumarchais. Va savoir's interest in investigating various layers of reality and artifice is characteristic of its director, but perhaps what sets the new film apart from his previous work is its sheer effortlessness. Graceful and elegant, it glides on the seamless ensemble work of its actors, in particular the peerless Jeanne Balibar.
Likewise a light-hearted recapitulation of its director's favorite themes, Shohei Imamura's consciously millennial Warm Water Under a Red Bridge had, despite all its raucous comedy, something almost valedictory about its tone. Ostensibly an ode to the feminine that doubles as a G-spot fantasy, the film found its spiritual and moral center in a good-humored, crotchety hobo (shades of the director?) who advocates sexual emancipation and decries all false pieties, including an unthinking acceptance of Japan's post-Confucian, capitalist work ethic. Dispatched early on in the film, the elderly vagrant returns time and time again, both in flashbacks and as a presence from above, telegraphing advice to the laid-off salaryman (omnipresent Koji Yakusho) who finds his life transformed when set off on a quest by the dying man. Despite an intrusive score, the mood is joyous (if not exactly anarchic or riotous, the case with some of Imamura’s wackiest films), and the direction a model of ease and efficiency. When the film literally climaxes with a suitably outsized celebration of jouissance, you can expect Imamura's alter ego to return with a message for his audience at the dawn of a new century: in the event, a friendly injunction not to take life, or indeed the movies, too seriously.
A more idiosyncratic and ultimately stronger film than either the Imamura or the Rivette, Manoel de Oliveira's I'm Going Home is in fact one of the gems of the festival, a model of stylistic rigor allied with delicate observation that serves as a testament to the unflagging powers of its nonagenarian filmmaker. Michel Piccoli (in one of the festival's most noteworthy performances) plays a successful stage actor who, during a performance of Ionesco's Exit the King, loses his entire family save his grandson to a car accident. Oliveira makes only one of a host of surprising directorial choices when he decides to forego depicting the immediate period of mourning (with a simple intertitle that says "some time later") and goes on instead to observe the actor attempt a return to normalcy by pursuing everyday routines. We watch him read the morning paper at his favorite table of a neighborhood café, contemplate the Parisian streets on a cab ride home, shop for shoes and pause by a storefront to observe a particularly poignant poster on display. The method is austere, the approach subtle, but emotionally the film strikes a genuine chord that puts to shame the welter of false notes that, to make an obvious comparison, Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room indulges in. When later in the film, Piccoli's principled stage actor divides his time between taking care of his grandson and taking on the unexpected challenge of playing Buck Mulligan in an English-language film version of Joyce's Ulysses, Oliveira offers still more evidence of his unusual eye when he shoots a number of scenes in an elliptical yet surprisingly revealing manner (a conversation on grief that hones in on a shot of Piccoli's new pair of shoes, or an entire rehearsal sequence observed via the sustained reaction shot of director-within-the-film John Malkovich). Unlike Moretti's film, which takes the easy and predictable way at every juncture from start to finish, Oliveira's never fails to offer an unusual perspective on its material that both offers insight and comes across as refreshing. Sadly (especially when, for all its eccentricities, it's not a particularly inaccessible film), I'm Going Home is one of the few movies at the NYFF this year to go home without a distributor. Perhaps someone reading this will rectify the situation.
Next to the Oliveira, Youssef Chahine's enjoyable enough Silence…We're Rolling comes across as a little lightweight, if not indeed quaint. Relatively restrained compared to Chahine's '99 NYFF entry, The Other - an extravagant, utopian fantasia on peace and coexistence in the Middle East that would not be amiss today - Silence boasts a number of musical sequences that are carried out with aplomb and, despite its film-within-a-film structure, nary the postmodern concerns of a Dancer in the Dark or a Moulin Rouge. (Indeed, like last year's Korean pansori film, Chunhyang, Chahine's musical serves as a reminder that the po-mo impasse is as much a matter of time as place.) A few outrageous special effects notwithstanding, though, this is for the most part a strictly old-fashioned entertainment, and certainly one of the less substantial items at the festival this year.
Next to the unforced eloquence of the old masters, a film like Laurent Cantet's well-intentioned, even noble Time Out seemed a little effortful by comparison. While the sympathy of the filmmaker for his downtrodden protagonist is never in doubt, and Aurélien Recoing seems desperation itself as an unemployed company man masquerading as if he has a new job to his family and friends, economy of expression is not one of the film's virtues. Less labored and certainly rife with incident, La Ciénaga (literally, "The Swamp") came courtesy of an even younger talent than Cantet. The feature début of 36-year-old Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel, La Ciénaga boasts a slightly unconventional approach to storytelling and a feverish, hothouse atmosphere, supported in part by an energetic, often oppressively shallow depth-of-field, handheld camera. Yet for all its ellipses and seemingly fragmented storytelling, the film is actually rather classical and novelistic in exposition. The script's focus on connecting initially isolated details and events into an ultimately linear and logical drama where every piece fits (as opposed to, say, allowing unrelated, more random observations to coalesce into an impressionistic, rather than narrative or dramatic, whole) feels certainly more memoir-like to me than vérité. For that reason alone, I wasn't sure if the visual aesthetic really pushes the film nearer to documentary or ends up being merely decorative – at times, indeed, it seemed to waver between these two effects. But even if it lacks the ultimate degree of rigor, this is very assured filmmaking, only a little more traditional and conventional than some are prepared to admit.
Initially less conventional but ultimately reliant on and unraveling thanks to traditional storytelling, another first feature reminded all of the sheer weight and constraints of narrative filmmaking. "Sonate, que me veux-tu?" was Boulez's question some four decades ago, wondering whether he could ever escape in musical composition the traditional structure of exposition, development, and recapitulation. The frustrated promise of Damien Odoul's début, Le Souffle, seems at least implicitly involved with the question: narrative, what do you want of me? Beginning as an absurdist portrait of rural life from the perspective of a bored shitless 15-year-old, the film loses its bearings two-thirds of the way through, when Odoul seems suddenly obliged to deliver a narrative, and piles dramatic incident upon incident, culminating in a bizarre, surrealistic resolution that feels not so much earned as contrived. Before then, Le Souffle succeeds most as a showcase for the astonishingly physical and unfettered performance of its nonprofessional actor, the remarkable Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc, whose un-self-conscious, wiry presence energizes and nearly rescues the film from coming undone. There's no shortage of stunningly crisp, high contrast black-and-white images throughout Le Souffle, but perhaps Odoul can learn a lesson or two from Lisandro Alonso's La Libertad. For purely mundane reasons, I was unable to see Alonso's film, but from the descriptions I've read of it (in the Cannes issue of Film Comment, for instance, Film Society of Lincoln Center director Richard Peña likens the film to Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, asserting that it belongs to that "grey area between documentary and fiction"), it certainly seems like a movie where observation is allowed to drive and map out the course while narrative drama for once has to take the backseat.
Whispers at the press screening I attended regarding the film's timeliness notwithstanding (although those who had been at Cannes must have found themselves thinking back instead on Mohsen Makhmalbaf's latest film - an in retrospect prescient critique of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan titled simply Kandahar), Majid Majidi's Baran, ostensibly concerned with the plight of Afghan refugees in the director's native Iran, is in fact a mildly relevant, characteristically tepid attempt at sentimental fable. In a generous mood one might describe its setup as Dickensian (an Afghan girl dressed as a boy to survive on an Iranian construction site has an initially hostile young man fall in love with her once he discovers her secret); a more accurate label, though, would be Griffith maudlin. Any real pain or struggle is elided as Majidi populates his film with pretty faces and stock characters parading all too familiar attitudes. (Would it make the girl's predicament any less terrible if she were less cute, less battered innocence writ large?) A humanist by rote, Majidi unfortunately lacks the stylistic resources to give credence to his regurgitated notions of love and sympathy. Those familiar with Majidi's previous films can expect more of the same: an unabashed use of close-ups and slow motion to milk key scenes, a tendency to reduce the specifics of the places and situations he depicts, and a generally Hollywood-ish approach to acting and scoring. Perhaps Baran would have been more effective had it been trimmer and more conscious of its mythic aspirations. As it is, it's a discursive and ungainly attempt.
One only has to compare the under-characterized Iran seen in Majidi's film (real locations lit and shot like a generic studio lot) with Wes Anderson’s enchanted, parallel New York in The Royal Tenenbaums to find oneself encountering artistry of an entirely different order. Indeed, if the complaint last year was that American cinema, both Hollywood and independent, was at its weakest in ages (only one US film, and a truly maverick release at that, made it into the New York Film Festival lineup, while the Village Voice mocked a Variety report on box-office receipts and titled its end-of-the-year critics' poll: "YANKS TANK, IMPORTS RANK"), the 39th NYFF saw a resurgence, if not an outright renaissance, in Amerindie cinema, with top-notch works from key talents whose individuality and vision clearly set them apart from the mainstream aspirants that have nearly made risible the very notion of an independent cinema. A characteristic riff on The Magnificent Ambersons, Tenenbaums is quintessential Anderson: charming, charmed, and in its avowed attempt to stylistically evoke the enchanted Gotham of old New Yorker issues, redolent of a carefree time and place far removed from the anxiety-filled Manhattan of the present. If there's something escapist and nostalgic about the whole enterprise, it has something to do with Anderson's pleasurably child-like view of the world: it's an innocent, romantic vision where, hearts willing, wrongs can always be righted, fences mended, and wounds healed. If that were only true in the real world. But Anderson's conviction and stylistic sureness are such that, as in Rushmore, there's pleasure in every detail of a precisely imagined, perfectly calibrated – in short, convincingly fairy-tale-like world.
Nearly as much fun as the Anderson but ultimately overextended, Richard Linklater's Waking Life plays like a garrulous user's guide to existence consciously designed to wake up millennial audiences primed more for information than knowledge at the movies. Say what? For much of Life, Linklater sustains the excitement of people engrossed in thought as he has his wide-eyed protagonist Wiley Wiggins listen raptly to philosophers from all walks of life proselytize with passion on behalf of a variety of ideas. (The model here seems to be the episode from Godard's Vivre sa vie where Anna Karina converses with the philosopher Brice Parain.) Among the interlocutors, some are actors working from a script, some friends of Linklater's who are simply riffing on their pet ideas or theories. Where the film clearly fall flats is in those places where it's evident that an actor is playing enthusiasm, and argument becomes patter. Otherwise, there is much that is engaging, and Bob Sabiston's computer animation overlay (the original, live-action footage was shot on DV) is an effective way to take the audience into the abstract realm of ideas Linklater is concerned with, and certainly aesthetically interesting enough on its own terms.
Substantially weaker than his fellow independents' efforts, Todd Solondz's Storytelling seemed distinctly underwhelming on first viewing, only to improve in memory when the festival served up the self-satisfied clichés of a Moretti or a Chéreau days later. I was not among the naysayers on Solondz's previous films, but some of the caustic wit that was such a hallmark of the earlier efforts appears to have misfired here, where all too often the targets are too easy, or the points too obvious, if not indeed labored. The film is divided into two parts, "Fiction" and "Non-fiction," both having something to do with the ethical and philosophical issues of representing life in art. But suffice it to say that, for all the trademark Solondz touches (among them, a son who pursues his father's affection at the expense of his siblings), there isn't much in the diptych that's particularly revealing or insightful about the interrelationship between fact and fiction. A throwaway establishing shot containing the Twin Towers was a grim reminder of recent events (an unintended effect all the more striking for its casual, pre-9/11 presence), but amidst all the controversy over prominent intellectuals laying the blame of the terrorist attacks squarely on America's dominance and privileged position in the world order, perhaps more disturbing was a subplot in Storytelling involving with a Latino maid who, emotionally abused and ultimately laid-off by her employer's spoiled, condescending young son ("Consuelo, why are you poor?" he demands rhetorically), decides to enact deadly revenge on her host family. Again, the appositeness was hardly intended, but nevertheless the scenario served as an urgent reminder of the dangers of cultural misunderstanding in a world of glaring inequalities.
For all its manifest problems, at least Storytelling was preferable, with Solondz's insistence on his very personal brand of cruelty and humiliation, to two genuinely discouraging, prestige items, whose success at other film festivals with presumably knee-jerk "humanist" juries made their tired peddling of platitudes appear all the more grotesque. Clearly, unthinking acceptance of clichés was here to stay in 21st-century cinema, and I defy anyone who cares about movies to think otherwise of Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room or Patrice Chéreau's dreary Intimacy. Moretti's film, which has already incited a veritable riot of detractors since its inexplicable lionization with the Palme d'Or at Cannes earlier this year, is a white-telephone, well-made weepie that trades in predictable emotions and unexceptional filmmaking. I have no wish to repeat some of the invective that has already been directed at The Son's Room (ranging from one commentator's relatively restrained tag of "emotional laxative" to Mark Peranson's truly hilarious dig in Cinemascope: "the film equivalent of a black velvet painting of a sobbing clown"), but the truth about the film is that it is at best unsurprising, at worst offensive in its cheap effects and refusal to let its grave subject speak for itself. One would have thought that by 2001 audiences would be sufficiently wary of over-scoring and flatly-lit movies that cut to a large close-up once someone breaks into tears, but no such luck. Like some of the mainstream media's coverage of 9/11 which reveled in an exploitation of tragedy (real emotions packaged into overlit, journalist-directed dramas), The Son's Room is a travesty, all the more unpalatable in present times for its casual, unearned approach to grief and healing.
More adeptly directed but no less conventional, Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy attracted attention at the Berlin Film Festival last year (where it won the Golden Bear) in part for its relatively explicit sex scenes, although the chief impression it left me with was that the cinéma du papa – that old-school, theatrical approach to filmmaking opposed by the French New Wave, privileging literary and production values over any tangible cinematic interest – still has its suckers after all these years. Intimacy may not look like an old-fashioned, self-important adaptation, but it certainly feels like one. An appropriated, "nervy" visual style lends the film a faux cinematic sophistication that it doesn't really possess; if anything, Eric Gautier's designer camerawork (pretty to look at, but determinedly empty when unmoored from either practicality or any organic aesthetic considerations) is just a way of dressing the prestigious source (Hanif Kureishi, so you know it's good). Likewise, the soundtrack of hip pop selections is employed less as an expressive device than as a fashionable, ambient hum – like the classical music that used to be attached to literary adaptations as a way to identify value, it's a badge worn here to show the "good taste" of the filmmakers. For all the location work, London looks like a studio backlot, and this being a stab at timeless, universal drama, the hilariously verbose characters – a bundle of tired assumptions – spout stilted banalities in a constant state of actorly anxiety. Intimacy's the kind of movie that likes to think its characters are saying something important and interesting...in every line of the film.
If the memorable long-take in Oliveira's I'm Going Home where the director simply observes Michel Piccoli's character being made up in preparation for a role that might prove an insurmountable challenge provided one of those electrifying moments in great cinema (all too rarely seen, even among this year's festival offerings) where tension is all subtext and very little action or drama, as it's conventionally understood, is actually taking place onscreen, Catherine Breillat's astonishing Fat Girl, bowing some two weeks later and providing much needed reinforcement in the hope for filmmaking of real stature amidst so-so work elsewhere at the festival, provided an analogous and equally charged moment (the opening shot of Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There? might be another) where action is minimal but where the patient real-time and seemingly placid surfaces of the long-take literally seethe with emotional undercurrents. Those who have seen Breillat's remarkable film will know that I'm referring to the lengthy deflowering scene – a hair-raising pas de deux between a glib, twentysomething stud and a naïve, underage nymphet that's compassionately observed by the director, yet considerably darkened and complicated by the off-screen presence of the girl's more worldly-wise yet alternately envious and disgusted sister, the overweight girl of the film's title. Energized for the most part by the dynamic between the more attractive and sexually adventurous girl and her observant, inactive sister (who offers ironic commentary on the wide-eyed fantasies of her sibling even as the older girl mocks her for her lack of social grace), Fat Girl reaches its logical conclusion when it offers a shock ending that, in near-carnivalesque fashion, upsets all the hierarchies (social, sexual, or otherwise) governing the world depicted up to that moment. The nightmarish "what if?" scenario serves, among other things, to further heighten Breillat's considered critique of the social hypocrisies and dated constructions that govern the notion of a girl's virginity in contemporary French society. I have previously found Breillat's work a little too over-conceptualized for its own good, but Fat Girl is a real departure. Characters have evolved from conceits into flesh-and-blood creatures, and Breillat's directorial touch has never been more acute, from a number of electrifyingly caught, privileged moments (among them a confessional heart-to-heart between the siblings) to a stunningly choreographed car ride that renders memorably graphic underlying tensions. Never prurient, Fat Girl in fact contains little graphic depiction of sex compared to Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy. It's the daring to expose raw nerves and emotions that makes it so much more uncomfortable and eloquent an experience when set against the naked playacting of Chéreau's travesty.
From its magnetic opening shot to its enigmatic close, Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There? represents, shot for shot, some of the most exhilaratingly rigorous filmmaking to be found at this year's festival. Picking up where The River left off, Tsai's film begins with the death of its main character Hsiao-Kang's father (the rock-like Miao Tien), and goes on to become a deeply personal study of grief, where mourning characteristically is viewed in sexual terms as an extended period of repressed and sublimated desire. The mother in the family obsesses over superstitious beliefs and prays for the reincarnation of her husband's spirit, while the son, falling in love with a young woman who goes off to France, busies himself attempting to reset all Taipei clocks to Paris time. Building up to an extraordinary, cross-cut climax where the frustrated desires of mother, son, and object of infatuation each finds individual, sexual expression (a devastating sequence that echoes and, in some ways, serves as a riposte to Kieslowski), the film jumps from Taipei to Paris and back with Tsai's usual mastery of tension-filled silences, alienating spaces, and deadpan wit. If The River proved to be a father-and-son movie without parallel, What Time Is It There?, like Tsai's Vive l'amour or The Hole, focuses much more on women: on Lu Yi-Ching's grieving, at times hysterical, mother (an altogether electrifying performance) and Chen Shiang-Chyi's beleaguered, quietly anxious, forever longing traveler. Shot in part with French financing, What Time Is It There? also doubles as a supremely idiosyncratic tribute to François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, an avowed favorite of the director and a palpable presence in What Time, both in the form of a badly pirated video Hsiao-Kang discovers in Taipei and a hilarious, near wordless cameo by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Clearly undaunted by the challenges of an international co-production, Tsai has survived the experience with his signature style largely intact, despite a new cinematographer (Tran Anh Hung regular, Benoît Delhomme, who according to Tsai persuaded him to work more with fluorescent lights) and considerably more sophisticated, Dolby sound work (masterminded for the first time by Taiwanese tonmeister extraordinaire and regular Hou Hsiao-Hsien collaborator, Du Tuu-Chih). A lighter and more optimistic film than some of Tsai's previous work, What Time also turns a new page in the director's Doinel-like chronicling of his lead character Hsiao-Kang's growth, clearly indivisible from the real-life maturation of actor Lee Kang-Sheng. The scene where Hsiao-Kang covers his asleep mother with his jacket lest she catches cold may well be one of the movies' most understated and moving depictions of growing up, here understood as the reciprocation of familial affection. A coda of considerable mystery and surprising comfort serves as an unforgettable farewell to a character whose formidable patriarchal presence, whether on-screen or not, has haunted nearly all of Tsai's films, from his debut Rebels of the Neon God to at least the present one – that of the father.
Centered, like 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 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 - more later) 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 might 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.
The author would like to thank Kristin G. (and Manoel de Oliveira, for making possible the instance of serendipity!)
All written material (c) 2002 by Derek Lam