CinemaSerf

Jul 20, 2024

7.0

I think it's pretty safe to say that Jean-Luc Godard was a bit of a selfish arse, and Louis Garrel captures that really quite effectively here. The film is set in 1967 when French society was being rocked by political upheaval, student demonstrations and where President De Gaulle was at his most unpopular. The thirty-six year old Godard was already an household name and had fallen for his young starlet Anne Wiazemsky (Stacey Martin) who could have been his daughter, and they marry. She adores him - his reputation, his vision, his passion whilst he loves the fact that she is young, beautiful and can be fairly easily twisted around his little finger. As the filming of his film "La Chinoise" proceeds, though, we discover that this relationship might not be much more than puddle deep and his constant search to remain relevant in an ever changing and increasingly hostile environment is taking it's toll on his temperament and his popularity. Many begin to suspect that his latest film - extolling the virtues of ultra-socialism as espoused by Mao is but a gimmick to keep him germane, but it's when his wife gets the chance to travel to Rome to work with Bertolucci and things start to unravel. She starts to open her own eyes to the failings in both herself and her husband - and it looks like a bit of chop and change is in the wind. Garrel does his best here to illustrate a man who is eccentric and quirky, capable of humour and jealousy but who struggles to see beyond the end of his own nose. Director Michel Hazanavicius was never going to be able to encapsulate all the vagaries of this man here, but he does allow his lead actors to develop plausible aspects of their personalities and we can fill in some gaps, make the odd gasp, and wonder why anyone would ever want to be associated with this fairly introspective film-making genius in the first place. The production itself is slightly stylised to mimic some of Godard's original techniques - the odd reverse exposure, bad continuity, jump cuts - but I'm not sure they were really necessary to remind us of the character we were following. You could probably do a mini-series on Godard and still not get it all in and/or right - this has a good try, though.