Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (116 page)

Having hired his actor, Godard fired his actress, and auditioned, according to his assistant Fleur Albert, fifty others, calling back six of them to read with Putzulu. Cécile Camp was chosen. “On Monday he called me to tell me I’d got it,” Camp reported. “We started to shoot on Wednesday.”
²⁸

E
LOGE DE L’AMOUR
is centered on a young man’s work on a “project”—in effect, a film without its apparatus—and his relationship with a young woman whom he seeks to enlist in it. The film is constructed as a flash-back: its first section, which runs an hour, takes place two years after the second, shorter section. As a result, many of the events in the film’s first half remain unclear until the flashback provides retrospective clarity. Yet the film’s initial ambiguities serve an unusual function: having elaborated the story over such a long period of time and woven into it so many strands of history and personal associations, Godard leaves many loose narrative threads, as if to invite an unusually free interpretive viewing. More than any of his prior films,
Eloge de l’amour
derives its significance from the wealth of particular incidents, lines of dialogue, gestures, and nuances of which it is composed; despite the intellect that the film embodies and the ideas it reflects,
Eloge de l’amour
is Godard’s most concrete and analogical work, the one which is most closely identifiable with the events that take place within it.

The first section, which is filmed in black and white, is set in Paris. A young man, Edgar (Putzulu), is seeking actors to play Eglantine and Perceval for a “project” regarding the four stages of love: “the encounter,” “physical
passion,” “separation,” and “reunion.” Among the candidates are a young woman from North Africa, who listens to Edgar tell the story of Eglantine being beaten at a protest while wearing a yellow star, and a pale and fragile woman and a gentle, elfin man who jointly audition for the roles of Eglantine and Perceval by reciting lines from Walser’s
La Rose
. (The scene, a real audition at an office, was filmed in February 1999, well before the actual shoot had begun. In the scene as filmed, Godard himself was heard off-camera in discussion with the candidates, but Putzulu’s voice was later dubbed in speaking Godard’s lines.)

Periodically, Edgar visits an older man, an art dealer named Rosenthal, who supports him and subsidizes his project. The family connections between Edgar and Rosenthal run deep: Rosenthal’s father and Edgar’s grandfather were partners in a gallery; both were both deported to concentration camps, and Rosenthal was also in love with Edgar’s mother, who married another man and eventually committed suicide. Now Rosenthal is in frequent discussion with his attorney—Paul Forlani, played in fact by Godard’s longtime acquaintance Rémo Forlani—over the restitution of artwork stolen from his family by German occupiers. (Godard’s choice of the name Rosenthal also runs deep: in Renoir’s
Rules of the Game
, it is the name of the mother of the Marquis de la Chesnaye, the owner of the manor, who is identified as a Jew; and it alludes to Paul Rosenberg, a French Jewish art dealer who was, at the time, involved in just such a suit.) Rosenthal asks Edgar about his “project”; Edgar explains its subject, the three ages of love—youth, adulthood, old age—and the impossibility of finding adults, and he mentions his difficulty in finding an actress for it. Rosenthal encourages Edgar to seek out a particular woman whom the young man had once known and had described as “not very attractive, but she dared to say things.”

Following up on rumors he’d heard, Edgar tracks the woman down to a depot on the outskirts of Paris, where she is working the night shift cleaning trains. When he approaches her, she refuses him outright. He wants to speak with her more, but she still has offices to clean and on the weekend will have to drive her son to see an uncle in the provinces.

Edgar continues to audition performers, but is dissatisfied with them all. To explain to one of them what is missing from her recitation of a text, he asks his assistant, Philippe, to show her how it should be done, and Philippe intones the Brasillach poem. Ultimately, Edgar finds the young woman again, at a bookstore in a Montparnasse passageway, where she is attending a conference with the American journalist Mark Hunter (a real journalist living in Paris) on the subject of Kosovo, specifically on “the judgment of war crimes.”

After the conference, Edgar and the as-yet-nameless young woman walk
through Paris from night until morning, stopping at a plaque on the Pont Neuf that reads, “Here, René Revel, keeper of the peace of the 15th arrondissement, Knight of the Legion of Honor, was killed by the Germans on August 19, 1944.” She says, “It should not be said like that. Neither ‘keeper’ nor‘peace,’ nor ‘the Germans.’” The next day, the two face the île Seguin, an islet in the Seine and the site of a former Renault plant, now closed and empty—“the empty fortress,” the woman calls it—where she tells the story of her parents, who (like Edgar’s mother) committed suicide. (Her father killed himself in 1970, she says, when she was five years old.)

She asks Edgar what he thinks of “what happened” in Brittany (referring—as is not yet clear from the film’s action—to their prior relationship, which ended two years earlier). Edgar says that she was right, then, to say that “the Americans”—those of the North, she specifies, “not the Mexicans, not Brazil”—“have no memory of their own, or very little. Their machines do, yes, maybe, but not them personally, so they buy that of others, especially of those who resisted.” After their discussion, Edgar returns to town—first entering and leaving a train at a station marked “Drancy-Avenir” (Drancy-Future). Drancy is a town north of Paris where the Vichy regime had established a staging area for transports to Auschwitz.

Having planted in the film a vast and intricate set of political, historical, and personal references, Godard then offers the most breathtakingly intimate love scene in his entire body of work: a single shot, almost three minutes long, of the young woman sitting at the desk of the bookstore, talking on the telephone to Edgar. His voice is heard only in the first sentence (“I wonder who had the brilliant idea to speak of the future at Drancy”). The rest of the shot, in which the woman is far from the camera and hidden in shadow, features only her voice, her side of the conversation. She refuses to reveal where she lives; she tells him to write to her care of the bookstore; she asks why he no longer speaks of his project; she says that she wants nothing to do with it—“I’m not pretty enough”—and, seemingly in response to his protest, adds, “On the contrary, I think that’s what you think.” She tells him, “You win, I was just smiling,” and asks him to repeat slowly the phrase that had made her smile, which she then recites back to him: “Each thought should recall the ruins of a smile.” Then she makes a confession, the significance of which becomes retrospectively clear only during the film’s second part: “You know, when I drove you after your meeting with Jean Lacouture, I left too, they’ve had no news of me since then. I was in the same train as you, I saw you at Montparnasse, I said to myself that one must let things take their course.”

Rosenthal and Philippe join Edgar for something like a staging of the “project” at a homeless shelter, where the two young actors seen auditioning
for Eglantine and Perceval perform a scene in which they reunite while soaping a man’s back. The scene is enacted for no camera and no audience, as a sort of private or command performance for the creators themselves.

Finally, in a flash forward, Edgar meets the woman’s grandfather (along with an unidentified man) at a café, to learn what has become of her. The grandfather tells him, “We received a letter from Amsterdam; there are people over there who help those who want to put an end to things.” He brings several books from among which she had wanted Edgar to take one; Edgar chooses
Le Voyage d’Edgar
—a 1938 adventure book by Edouard Peisson, mentioned by Johnny Hallyday in
Detective
, that Godard had loved as a child.

Her grandfather reproaches Edgar for not having pursued his “project” and tells him that she believed in it. Edgar responds, “One doesn’t kill oneself for that.” He asks Edgar, “Did you know her well?” Edgar answers, “I didn’t even know her name, nor yours, for that matter. In your hotel, we talked for seven or eight minutes, and the same when we saw each other again, no more. The tone of her voice interested me, the ideas often became very lively; for the rest, she was a disappointment.” The old man tells him, “You’re the disappointment.”

This seems like the end of the film, but it is only the one-hour mark. After a close-up of the book
Le Voyage d’Edgar
, the film bursts from black-and-white into brilliant, acidic color, a seascape with the sea a fiery orange and the sky an acrid yellow, an image that introduces the title card “Two Years Earlier.”

Edgar walks down a country road and a car stops for him. The driver identifies himself as (and in fact is) Jean-Henri Roger, a filmmaker and Godard’s associate in the Dziga Vertov Group. Roger plays, in his own name, a regional cultural counselor in Brittany. (He is recognizable as the man who accompanied the woman’s grandfather at the café.) Edgar explains that he has come to do research about Catholics in the Resistance, in preparation for “a cantata about Simone Weil”—the Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and sought to be active in the Resistance. Roger offers to show him archives left by his own great-uncle, Gilbert Renaud, the famed resister, “Colonel Rémy” of the Confrérie Notre-Dame.

Almost from the beginning of the sequence, Godard’s attention is fixed on the United States, as a car pulls up beside Roger’s and a brassy African-American woman impatiently asks for directions. Roger tells Edgar that she is “one of the Americans who are bugging us.” It soon becomes clear which Americans Roger is referring to, when he and Edgar arrive at their destination: a hotel belonging to an elderly couple, where Edgar has been invited to meet and interview Jean Lacouture, the historian and journalist (who also
plays himself), about the Catholics and the Resistance. Lacouture explains that the hotel’s proprietors are “two former Resisters who have sold their memory to Hollywood” in order to keep their hotel running.

At the hotel, the owner’s wife, Madame Bayard, has a meeting with two people from Hollywood—the African-American woman and a man, Lemmy (played by Lemmy Constantine, the son of Eddie Constantine)—as well as one man from Washington, “Sumner Welles Jr.” (The young woman from the first part of the film, referred to in passing as Berthe—not Isabelle—is also present.) Welles explains his presence at the gathering, in response to a question from Berthe: “Do please understand, my dear young lady, that Washington is the real director of the ship, and that Hollywood is—forgive me, Lemmy—only the steward.”

While this meeting takes place upstairs, Edgar is downstairs with Jean Bayard, who owns the hotel. Jean explains that his granddaughter, Berthe, “got sick, stopped everything, and now works in Paris in a lawyer’s office.” Jean also talks about his wartime past, telling Edgar that the “intelligence service” of their Resistance network had asked him to work for the Gestapo as a double agent, and that as a result, “many people died.” As Edgar later learns from Berthe, Jean had been ordered to denounce Madame Bayard, as a result of which she was sent to Ravensbrück; they married upon her liberation.

The Hollywood meeting upstairs continues. The grandmother listens to Lemmy read the contract: “Our company, Spielberg Associates and Incorporated [
sic
], has acquired the rights… to tell this man and woman’s story from the terrible years of’ 41,’ 42,’ 43 and’ 44.” The film would be called
Tristan and Isolde
, the name of the network of resisters; the script would be written by William Styron, and the role of the young Madame Bayard would be played by “Juliette Binoche, who has just received an Oscar.”

Berthe interrogates the young executive—“objection, your honor”—on his description of William Styron as an “American writer,” asking, “Which ‘American’ do you mean?” He says, “Obviously, someone from the United States.” “Obviously,” she answers, “but Brazil is also made up of united states.” He says “of North America,” and she responds, “Mexico is also made up of united states of North America, and those people are called Mexicans; Canada too, and they are called Canadians.”

She continues: “So what is the name of what you call your United States? You see, you have no name. This agreement has been signed with the representative of a country the inhabitants of which have no name. It’s no surprise that they need other people’s stories, other people’s legends,” and she suggests that “since you don’t have a long history, you go looking for it from others, in Vietnam, in Sarajevo.” Lemmy Constantine reminds her that the
Bayards have cashed their first check, for fifty thousand dollars. Berthe reads another clause—“In all the films, all the young girls must get undressed and roll around with their lovers”—and asks her grandmother, “Is that really your story with Grandfather?” Lemmy says, “Steven gave me a cassette of his film,
Schindler’s List
, so that Madame Bayard can verify the seriousness of his intentions.”

Berthe and Edgar (who have seen each other for an instant, through a window, in an astonished glance that seems like love at first sight) meet after the discussion has broken up. She has come downstairs to search for a video-cassette recorded by her grandfather. “There is a terrible image there,” she says, “the gaze of the guilty upon the innocent,” and Godard includes a clip of it on-screen: an image of a man, who resembles Hitler, gazing at a pile of naked corpses. When she enters the room downstairs, Jean and Edgar are talking at a table, with books before them, and Jean reads several passages, including one from Sartre: “Today, August 20, 1945, in this deserted and starving Paris, the war has ended but the peace has not yet begun.”

As Edgar goes to take his leave, Berthe pulls him aside to ask, “When did the gaze founder?” Edgar answers, “Ten years ago, fifteen, perhaps fifty years ago, before television.” The two continue to talk, and Edgar asks about the contract discussion. Berthe answers, “Jean wants money because the hotel is failing. As for her, I don’t know, I think that she wants to be a star the way she was sixty years ago, with the Tristan network.”