Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (95 page)

Then, on October 21, 1984, another old ally, François Truffaut, died. Truffaut had been suffering from a brain tumor. He and Godard had never reconciled.
Cahiers du cinéma
published a special issue in December 1984,
Le Roman de François Truffaut
(The Novel of François Truffaut), for which Godard wrote a text, “Tout seul” (All Alone), in the same elliptical style as the memorial for Beauregard. Even now, Godard could not bring himself to honor Truffaut the filmmaker. He hailed the critic: “There was Diderot… Baudelaire… Elie Faure… Malraux… then François… there was never any other art critic.” He praised the critic’s audacity if not his consistency: “He didn’t hesitate to cast the first stone… I don’t know whether he continued… one can’t do everything… taking on other people’s sins before his own.” But then, Godard derided the filmmaker: “We knew that a film had to be made alone… but we were four… so it took us some time to admit it… then some of us recanted… in our case, the screen was the judge.” The screen, Godard hinted, had judged Truffaut guilty of a kind of perjury. Godard lamented Truffaut’s obsession with books, suggesting that it killed him (“too much information… it went to his head”) and wrote that when Truffaut went to “Father Alfred”—meaning Hitchcock—to be “absolved,” the unfortunate result was yet another book (meaning Truffaut’s famous volume of interviews with Hitchcock). Ending with a note regarding both departed filmmakers (Hitchcock had died in 1980), Godard wrote, “we’ll surely meet them again.”

Yet the specific inspiration for the death-saturated story of
Soigne ta droite
came to Godard by chance. In the summer of 1985, the song “Marcia Baïla”—Portuguese for “Marcia Dances”—by the French rock duo Les Rita Mitsouko, became a national hit as a result of its music video. The
rock critic of
Le Monde
, Alain Wais, advised Godard to watch it.
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After seeing it, Godard contacted the duo about the possibility of filming them at work.

The two musicians, Catherine Ringer and Fred Chichin, operated in a way that mattered to Godard: the two were a couple, and they worked at home. Their “studio” was a small two-room apartment in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris where they lived. They were tinkerers who filled their apartment with audio equipment, much of it nonprofessional, and they recorded their music themselves. “Marcia Baïla” was acknowledged to be the first “homemade” French pop hit.
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(With its success, the couple moved to another nearby apartment and used the first as a recording studio.)

Despite the song’s exuberance, its subject is death. The “Marcia” of the title is Marcia Moretto, Ringer’s former dance teacher, who died of cancer.
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Chichin had composed the soaring melody and the bouncy Brazilian rhythm, to which Ringer put the lyrics:
“But it’s death that has killed you, Marcia/It’s death that has consumed you, Marcia.”

When Godard approached Chichin and Ringer, Les Rita Mitsouko were about to record an album,
The No Comprendo
, but, as the musicians discovered, they had another thing in common with Godard: they no more knew what they were going to record than Godard knew what he was going to film. Their songs took shape in the studio, and—over a two-month span at the end of 1985 and beginning of 1986—Godard filmed the duo in the various stages of composition, creating an electronic rhythm track, searching for a guitar or keyboard riff, composing lyrics, laying down vocals.

The duo gave Godard the key to the apartment where they worked. He sometimes arrived in the morning before they did, and generally came by in the late afternoon with Caroline Champetier and a gaffer (electrician), though sometimes Champetier shot footage in Godard’s absence.
³⁴
When he was there, Godard usually recorded the sound himself, and his methods surprised Ringer: instead of keeping a microphone solely on the musicians, she explained, he had three microphones in three different places: “He had a boom [on the musicians], a microphone outside at the window for the ambient sounds, and he himself wore his little clip-on microphone.”
³⁵

The Zeiss superspeed lenses that Godard had purchased allowed him to shoot in extreme low-light situations without adding ordinary movie lighting. The setup in the band’s studio was spare, with daylight coming in from windows and a few added incandescent bulbs which he redirected with mirrors. In a procedure that would mark Godard’s work from that time forth, he filmed in the direction of the source of light—with the small spotlights shining directly into the lens. This technique, which greatly surprised Champetier at the time,
was more than a style. It would ultimately become the film’s dominant metaphor—for the confrontation with death.

During the shoot, Godard said that he was unsure of what he would do with the footage of the musicians: “Depending on the results, we will keep the images as they are, in a documentary… Or else, we will create a fiction as a setting for the strongest images.”
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Ultimately, he kept the documentary images but also elaborated a linked group of fictional sketches inspired by the song that had drawn his attention to Les Rita Mitsouko in the first place. “Marcia Baïla” had helped Godard find the subject for his film: like the catchy song,
Soigne ta droite
would be a comedy about death.

T
HE FILM BEGINS
with images of the French landscape viewed in low over-flight as a deep male voice-over sets forth the film’s main premise:

Near the end of the 20th century, the telephone rings at the Idiot’s home. He has finished his work and is about to spend one of those quiet evenings that one can still have in certain out-of-the-way parts of Europe, halfway between the forests of southern Germany and the lakes of northern Italy. That’s when the telephone rings: the voice is unfamiliar and polite, but commanding. In high places, they are prepared to forgive the Idiot his many sins, but he has to act fast: to invent a story, to film it, and to deliver the print that very afternoon to the capital. The film must be in distribution that very evening. A car will be waiting for him at the garage in the valley and a plane ticket at the local airport. On those terms, and only on those terms, will the Idiot be forgiven.

The opening credits end with what Godard called the film’s “real title”
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—
Une Place sur la terre
(A Place on Earth)—and then the Idiot appears: Godard himself, in a garage, wearing a three-piece suit of an old-fashioned cut and a short-brimmed felt hat, sitting in front of a Rolls-Royce. Godard the Idiot, as his opulent display suggests, turns out to be a Prince too (and to make sure that the point is not missed, he shows himself reading a copy of Dostoyevsky’s
The Idiot
). In the garage, he launches into a riff of cultural nostalgia: reminiscing about the decline of tennis at Wimbledon, he mimes the rhythmic head-turning and polite applause of tennis of an earlier era and then the violent smashes and snarling bravado of contemporary champions.

Godard attempted to model his own performance not on Jacques Tati or Jerry Lewis but the mild-mannered silent-era comedian Harry Langdon, whose persona embodied innocent sweetness in a coarse world. The pairing was apt: filming himself as the living representative of a lost age of refinement,
of culture and art, Godard played the Idiot and Prince with a similarly beleaguered dignity.

Yet he also suggested the moral burden and personal price of his civilized and artistic anachronism, setting the tone for the film’s grave import in the first scene that includes Jacques Villeret. The scene, which delivers high literary drama from an antic conceit, builds to one of the most moving moments Godard has ever filmed. The pudgy, soft-eyed Villeret plays the Individual, a lost soul and an object of ridicule. He pays a visit to an imperious, elegant man in a lavish apartment: the Man (the stately, bluff veteran François Périer). The Individual’s visit to the Man resembles the visit of an artist to a patron, a child to a father, or a clown to a king. The Man demands of him, “Have you invented something?” After a series of charades which the Man rejects, the Individual sits beside the Man at his table, pulls out a book, and announces, “The most striking example of fraternity that I know—and which I have invented.” The Man takes the book from him and reads aloud:

In a hotel in Peïra-Cava, I am in the midst of writing the scene where the wounded revolutionaries from Shanghai are going to be thrown into the boiler of the locomotive. Katov managed to conserve his cyanide. In the night, his hand meets that of Souen, beside him, who presses his. I then divine that Katov will place the cyanide in the hand that has just embraced his own.

The Man asks the Individual, “What is this called?” The Individual answers, “La condition humaine”—“the human condition,” which is also, of course, the title of a novel (in English,
Man’s Fate
) by André Malraux.
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In the human condition depicted by Malraux and crystallized by Godard, the ultimate state of freedom is the possibility of suicide, and the greatest act of fraternity, of love, is to make the suicide possible. In one scene, one shot, one sentence, Godard unfolds the inseparability of love and death, of life and death.

In the Idiot’s breakneck quest to deliver the film, he boards an airplane—a comic set piece, with jostling and yelling and roughhousing, as a pilot calmly reads “Suicide: A User’s Manual.” In the middle of it all, the Idiot sits beside an old woman whose skein of red wool he holds on his outstretched hands as she winds it. When she comments that he seems sad, he explains, “It is always a little sad to leave the earth.”

The airplane, a vehicle leaving earth, is also heading toward death: the passengers and crew ardently scoop and consume soup from an industrialsized pot reminiscent of the large soup pot of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid that the followers of Jim Jones used to kill themselves and their children in Jonestown in Guyana in 1978.
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Godard said that he conceived the airplane scene in
homage to two Jerry Lewis films,
The Family Jewels
, from 1966, which features a comical airplane scene, and
Smorgasbord
, from 1983, in which Lewis’s character repeatedly tries to commit suicide but comically fails.

Godard had originally wanted to develop
Soigne ta droite
in close collaboration with Villeret. The actor later recalled that the project arose from his and Godard’s shared interest in the work of Samuel Beckett,
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and that Godard had wanted him to play an essentially Beckettian role, “the solitary man, on the stage of the world.”
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The collaboration went poorly—Villeret was afraid of Godard, who in turn found the actor inhibited—but Villeret composed his own physical gags for the character of the Individual. Godard filmed that character staying alone in a nearly bare seaside apartment and crawling toward a massive dining-room table to start a cassette player emitting lines from Beckett (“That’s how he talks, how he talks to himself, that afternoon, here on earth, there’s only me, and a voice that can’t be heard through the noise, because it’s headed toward nobody”). Also in Trouville, filming the sky through an old-fashioned set of swinging doors, Godard added a voice-over to explain the image: “Westerners, among others, think that there’s one room, Life, and another, the Beyond, and that Death is the door by which one passes from one to the other, is that not so? But why do they dramatize the door? Man is born for Death.”

In another extraordinarily poignant sketch, the Individual plays a Belgian being deported by train. A secret police agent keeps him handcuffed to the curtain rod above the train window. The result is a pair of images, among the most beautiful that Godard ever filmed, first with the handcuffed hand in focus and the landscape rushing by in the background as a vague greenness, and then with the hand out of focus, an ominous and chilling presence before the inhabited landscape that is seen clearly behind it. The Individual plays this scene with a comically broad Belgian accent (jokes about Belgians being the French equivalent of Polish jokes in American humor) and hears from his captor the list of people killed because they could not learn to speak French properly, including “little Odile with a name like a town in Switzerland”—the town being Versoix, the woman being Odile Versois (the actress Marina Vlady’s sister, who died in 1980) and an allusion to Godard’s mother Odile, also from a town in Switzerland.

The Individual is transported to a sports stadium, where he enters a section filled with people strewn about, barely alive and barely speaking, like concentration camp victims in a mass grave. The incident is a double reminiscence, bringing together the recent catastrophe at a soccer match at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels on May 29, 1985, when rowdy fans pushed on a wall that gave way and killed thirty-nine spectators, and the use during wartime of the Vélodrome d’Hiver (the winter bicycle racetrack, the “Vel’ d’Hiv”)
in Paris as an internment point for Jews prior to their deportation to Auschwitz. To reinforce the suggestion, one deportee on the stadium floor says he lives in the “Hotel Terminus” (the title of Marcel Ophüls’s documentary about the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie), and the narrator refers to a dream that became “a second immensity, it became the law that presides over the development of crystal”—Kristallnacht.

Meanwhile, the Prince, rushing to deliver the cans containing his finished film, descends from the airplane. In this climactic moment of the film, Godard falls from the staircase to the tarmac, beside the film cans. As he lies dying, a woman banker from the airplane negotiates with him to purchase the film, and pays him with a party-noisemaker rattle, which he twirls in the air with his last breath. The film that he completed under the deadline has been finished at the cost of his life.