Review #19

Ok, here's a first for this blog: a negative review.

Eloge de l'amour - Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

I will begin this review by stating that I am a very big admirer of Godard's earliest work. While I was completing A-level film studies there was an opportunity to research a subject of your choice as part of coursework. Without a trace of hesitation I chose to research Godard, the project having the convoluted title (don't laugh) 'The film aesthetic in the auteurial signature of Jean-Luc Godard during the French New Wave period'.

Godard, even in the early '60s, never cared for linear narratives or conventional dialogue. Roughly from 1968 onwards he has eschewed any element of narrative to construct 'film essays', assembling a melange of images and words that, apparently, when viewed on a number of occasions, all falls into place. Eloge de l'amour is considered to be amongst the best of his later work.

Having sat through all this, I can quite simply say that it was not a pleasant experience. I find Godard's agenda snobbish and reactionary, simply there to flaunt his own superiority. Why attack Spielberg, the United States, imperialism, etc.? I am mystified by it all.

Godard's New Wave films include back-and-forth banter that works to great effect. In this film, again, conventional dialogue is put away with. This time I found it to be sophomoric and pretentious, making me cringe for the most part. There is no interaction as much as a series of loose, unconnected aphorisms.

A lot of his aesthetic has been to be unorthodox and 'radical', often using alternate camera angles and framing. Here, though, I became really flustered by characters constantly being filmed from their backs, elongated shots, random intertitles. A film like Vivre sa vie also employed these techniques, but then there was a lot of vitality and vigor that held it together that I find missing here.

The cinematography has moments of great beauty, particularly the black-and-white footage of Paris and the transition to colour in the second half of the film.

I guess that I haven't picked up on what other people see in this film. To me, it seemed like pseudo-intellectual nonsense; perhaps I may have disentangled its meaning and appeal on repeated viewings, but judging by how bored and irritated I was by it all, I was not encouraged by that thought.