Where Is The Love?

It is clear from his latest feature, In Praise of Love, that Jean-Luc Godard knows there's only one passage to a sound critical accounting of his work: his own death. When there are no more Godard movies, because there is no more Godard, we will be forced to reexamine his 40-year-plus body of work, most of which (from 1980 on, anyway) is devoted to mourning. Indeed, Godard has been a one-man grief factory in the past two decades; he hasn't yet learned that the final step, as the self-help books say, is acceptance. Or perhaps, in Praise, he has, and it's just that Godard's version of acceptance is more chilling than the rage, bargaining, and denial of other, lesser artists.

But here's the rub: Critics have so long thrown up their hands at grasping Godard's cinema that it has become common for them to take one of his new movies as a sort of impressionistic hot tub: a series of lovely image-and-sound pairings, apparent non sequiturs, and Punch-and-Judy scenes that, stirred together, "mean whatever you want them to mean." Yet In Praise of Love makes clear that Godard's style isn't merely impulsive or arbitrary. Like the playwright-director Richard Foreman, Godard plants content in front of us only to dissolve it before our eyes like an Alka-Seltzer tablet.

In Praise, Godard will take some pregnant aphorism--"And then the poor...I don't know how memory can help us reclaim our lives" or "It is not whether man will endure, but whether he has the right to"--and overlay an image that further complicates our comprehension of it. Then he'll add a note of elegiac music whose very downbeat nature appears to pull us in a different direction from the spoken sentence. This strategy leaves us just on the verge of understanding the point that Godard is making about history, America, memory, resistance, sex, or justice. But in fact, the point is never actually made: Godard deliberately keeps it out of our reach. We in the audience are expected to do the work of finding the director's point of view--a job that few in the critical community (save for the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum) have even tried to do.

In Praise of Love is notorious for its purported "anti-Americanism," though Godard's gibes at Hollywood, and Spielberg in particular, are equivocal at most. In the movie's most openly telling scene, a group of French intellectuals gathers to hear an American journalist testify about the horrors he saw in the Balkans. (Godard visited this territory--tastelessly--in For Ever Mozart.) As the journalist gives his testimony, the French sneer at his accent, until an older man of their number tauntingly asks, "What about your own parents in 1943? And your grandparents in 1918?" The overriding theme of Praise is testimony--fervent, first-person testimony--that is ignored by artists seeking the Higher Ground. In the movie's most painful scene, a filmmaker puts a working-class woman trying to tell her own story through the most humiliating paces. ("Listen! I didn't say 'Look.' Listen!") Earlier, the same auteur--trying to tell a "Simone Weil or Hannah Arendt"-type story in "a film, or a novel, or an opera"--chases an Arab woman, a non-actress, through a train station to get her to appear in his film. Just as we glean that his motives are less than aesthetically pure, we notice that Godard is focusing not on the characters' faces, but on the boxcars leaving the City of Lights--another Godardian banner reading, Resistance Is Futile.