Review: If You Love Godard, You’ll Hate-Watch ‘Godard Mon Amour’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/movies/godard-mon-amour-review.html

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“Godard Mon Amour,” the latest offering from the pasticheur Michel Hazanavicius (“The Artist,” “OSS: 117”), chronicles an eventful year or so in the life of the cineaste Jean-Luc Godard. The period covered by the film includes the 37-year-old Godard’s marriage to the 19-year-old actress Anne Wiazemsky (on whose memoir it’s based) and the uprising of French students and workers in May 1968, a revolt that, among other things, shut down that year’s Cannes Film Festival. On being informed of the existence of Mr. Hazanavicius’s project, Mr. Godard — who is now 87 and whose latest film, “Le Livre d’Image,” will be in Cannes next month — is reported to have called it a “stupid, stupid idea.” Au contraire! (All due respect.) It’s a brilliant idea. It just happens to be a terrible movie.

But not without a certain morbid fascination. For hard-core Godardians, “Godard Mon Amour” will be an indispensable hate-watch. For the Godard-ambivalent, the critical outrage of the partisans will provide its own kind of amusement. But you don’t need to have strong feelings about Godard to notice the off flavors in this airy, brightly colored macaron. You may know two or three things about him when the movie starts — or about France, politics, sex and cinema — but rest assured that by the time it’s over, you will know less.

Godard, for better and for worse, is a cinematic thinker, someone who has tried, over the course of a prolific and contentious career, to locate the philosophical potential and the intellectual essence of the medium, to make it a vessel for ideas and arguments as well as for stories, pictures and emotions. Mr. Hazanavicius is the opposite: an unmistakably skilled maker and manipulator of images and styles with nothing much to say and no conviction that anything needs to be said at all. His appropriation of Mr. Godard’s most imitable signatures — counterpointed voice-overs, chapter titles that pop onto the screen, jaunty editing, naked women speaking in riddles — amounts less to homage than to revenge. “Godard Mon Amour” works tirelessly to implicate its subject in its own shallowness.

Godard in 1967 and 1968 is a famous and controversial director, a culture hero of the times chafing against his fame and trying to adapt his art to the volatile political climate. Wiazemsky (played by Stacy Martin), granddaughter of the conservative writer François Mauriac, has recently starred in “La Chinoise,” Godard’s contribution to (and satire of) the Maoist turn in left-wing French youth culture. She marries him and gladly takes on the role of muse and erotic ideal, finding his grumpiness charming and his intelligence very sexy.

Godard’s charisma is made plausible partly by the fact that he is played by Louis Garrel, whose casting is a bit of a French film in-joke. (Mr. Garrel’s father, Philippe, is a director who has been called “the child of Cocteau and Godard.”) Mr. Garrel is a formidable actor, and also, it turns out, a clever celebrity impersonator. In a different pop-culture universe, his Godard, with a voice like a sibilant bullfrog and a permanent air of mild indigestion, might be a fixture of “Saturday Night Live,” showing up as an occasional commentator on “Weekend Update” or a contestant on “Black Jeopardy.”

Here, the running joke is that he keeps breaking his glasses, sometimes at the demonstrations that provide Mr. Hazanavicius with opportunities for walking-and-talking exposition and cast-of-dozens action sequences. Occasionally, amid the chanting and banner waving, a fan will approach to praise Godard’s early-60s movies like “Breathless” and “Contempt.” The devolution of the director’s response from awkward politeness to outright nastiness is a sign of his creative, ideological and emotional crisis.

Godard wants to find an approach to filmmaking that will answer to his sense of political urgency, an insurgent cinema that will be adamantly critical of everything conventional and bourgeois. Nothing is easier, at present, than to mock this ambition, and much of the politicized art of the late ’60s must have seemed naïve, pretentious or overstated even at the time. But the notion that film might offer more than capitalist entertainment and reflect impulses beyond individual self-expression — that it might provide a weapon against oppression or a route to collective imagination — shouldn’t be dismissed. Godard’s post-68 experiments, lazily evoked here as a dead end, could more productively be seen as a road not taken.

This version of Godard must choose between cinema and politics, a predicament that would be more credible if Mr. Hazanavicius had a credible conception of either term. As for love, the ostensible focus of the movie, it represents another squandered opportunity. No one would argue that Mr. Godard is a nice guy. Misanthropy has been part of his persona since his days as a film critic, and his biography is littered with broken friendships and burned bridges. But in spite of Mr. Garrel’s mischief, this movie doesn’t even make him an interesting creep.

Ms. Martin is a charming and dedicated performer, but the film is no better than Godard himself at appreciating Wiazemsky as a fully dimensional person. She loves her husband until he makes it impossible. He is narcissistic, professionally jealous and sexually possessive, freaking out when his wife is cast in an Italian movie that requires her to appear naked. His reaction leads to a scene in which Mr. Garrel and Ms. Martin, in their birthday suits, debate the ethics and aesthetics of on-camera nudity. This is the kind of self-referentiality that might be labeled “Godardian” by students in an introductory film class trying to bluff their way to a C. Which describes Mr. Hazanavicius pretty well.