#59
Post
by Red Screamer » Fri Feb 15, 2019 9:03 pm
Caught up with this after the discussion here made me curious. If you think it's clever to have one character tell another, "Life isn't like movies, there isn't a voiceover that says 'Anne loved Jean-Luc'" followed by a voiceover that says "Anne loved Jean-Luc" or to have your leads criticize nude scenes while standing in the nude, you'll think this is a funny movie. If you think it's smart to film a sex scene between the Godard character and the Wiazemsky character combining references to the nude Bardot inserts from Le mepris and the Macha Méril body part montage from Une femme mariée, treating these three women, two sequences and two films as interchangeable, you could also just watch the Selena Gomez video that references Pierrot le fou.
I found this to be competently made bullshit, mostly interested in scoring easy points on the Godard character (like one scene where he can't define "fascism" or another where he starts an argument with the Wiazemsky character, she kisses him, and then he turns to the camera and says "Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, it gets you out of anything"), telling the audience just what to think and feel about him at every moment, whether it's with crowds who scream at him in response to his political opinions and the disowning of his earlier films or ham-fisted reaction shots of the other "reasonable" characters in the scene, usually the responsibility of Stacy Martin. In this way, and throughout the film, Hazanavicius collapses the complaints against Godard from Wiazemsky's character and his fans into one (during their last fight in the film she says to him, "You no longer seduce me...or anyone else", presumably a reference to his unsexy post-Pierrot work, speaking for all of us who are supposed to hate La chinoise).
Le redoubtable seems to gain the favor of the other people in this thread by making the Godard character an asshole—no doubt the real JLG is difficult and can be downright cruel, but you don't have to look much further than his films or Visages, villages or interviews with him etc etc for more interesting takes on that—but, having just watched Tout va bien and the interview included on the Arrow disc where Godard thoughtfully and self-critically speaks about how to represent the working class struggle in cinema and the role he plays in that as an intellectual, the idea of oppressed people being silenced and having trouble expressing themselves etc, I find it much harder to swallow the superficial sarcasm of Hazanavicius' film ("Watch Bertolucci Destroy Godard by Saying He Knows Nothing About the Working Class"). Its mockery of the interest, commitment, and subsequent response to May '68 in Godard's life and work, its meaningless homages to his early films, and its lip service criticism of Godard's interpersonal cruelty, while itself condescending to the Wiazemsky character and ogling her body at every turn, make everything into a reactionary sitcom, not saying anything new about the filmmaker, the period, the films. It's also just not funny.