ÉLOGE DE L'AMOUR
IN PRAISE OF LOVE |
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Writer/Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Edgar: Bruno Putzulu; Elle: Cécile Camp; Grandfather:
Jean Davy; Grandmother: Françoise Verny; Eglantine: Audrey Klebaner;
Perceval: Jeremy Lippman; Mr. Rosenthal: Claude Baignères.
Running time: 97 minutes
Year of production: 2001
Rating: Not rated (general audience)
Gauge: 16 & 35mm, DVD (b&w & color)
Language: French
Distributor: New Yorker Films
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“Is
it missing the point to say that the film is, above all, extremely
beautiful? Absolutely not, because real beauty--beauty invented rather
than, as Godard would say, programmed--is the greatest rarity in cinema
today. Even in this film, relatively manicured and packaged for public
consumption, Godard still ventures further beyond the standard codes
than even the most confrontational of his peers.” Jonathan Romney,
The Independent. |
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Edgar
is preparing a project on the theme of love which will follow couples
of three ages, young, old and adult, through love’s four stages:
meeting, passion, separation and reconciliation. But Edgar doesn’t
yet know what form the project should take--film, play, novel, opera?
While auditioning actors, he encounters a woman perfect for a role
whom he realizes he has met before, but when he decides to cast her
he learns that she has died. The first part of the film is shot in
a luminous black-and-white reminiscent of Godard’s work of the
1960’s, and even revisits some of the same locations. In the
second part, set two years earlier, Godard uses super-saturated video
to convey the sense of a vibrant, still-living past. Here Edgar first
encounters the woman he would cast, the grand-daughter of two WWII
Resistance veterans who are being approached by a Hollywood studio,
headed by Monsieur Spielberg, to sell their story. Americans have
no memory of their own, someone suggests, so they steal that of others.
Throughout this fragmentary but coherent film Godard scatters maxims
and gnomic phrases, sprinkles arresting images, and poses more questions
than he attempts to answer. But his provocations attest to his continuing
faith in the cinema as an engine of thought and change.
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| PHOTO Courtesy
of Manhattan Pictures |
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