In Praise of Love
Éloge de l'amour 
review by Gregory Avery, 6 September 2002

Excited About Cinema

When Jean-Luc Godard's film In Praise of Love premiered at Cannes in May, 2001, all anyone could talk about afterwards was the Spielberg bit. Some American types show up at the home of an aging married couple on the coast of Brittany to buy the rights to their life story as Resistance fighters during the Second World War: William Styron will write the screenplay, and Juliette Binoche will be gotten to star in it because she just won the Oscar. One young woman -- the couple's granddaughter, in fact -- raises an objection: Americans, and particularly Hollywood, has no stories of its own, so they go around and buy up other people's. Steven Spielberg did very well by the story of Oskar Schindler, but not a penny went to Schindler's widow. That may be because Spielberg bought the rights to Thomas Keneally's book, not the rights to the Schindlers (And, anyway, Spielberg has spent a great deal of money since then to set up the Shoah Foundation, whose purpose is to record and preserve the histories of all living Holocaust survivors).

I can't argue with the fact that Hollywood has, still, successfully globalized the world -- a look at the international box office charts in weekly "Variety" will confirm that. And, while the Americans in the film may seem callous in buying the couple's life story, why is the couple selling it to begin with? The reasons for that, as it turns out, are not so innocuous, either.

The scene takes up a relatively tiny part of Godard's film, and it is but one component of Godard's general concern, which has to do with the reduction of life to the form of image -- or, more precisely, surface -- without weight, meaning, or relevance. The main character, Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), is a young, studious, serious-minded artist who has financial backing to make a project, but he can't quite realize what that project is going to be, or even what final form it's going to take. The first hour of the film, showing Edgar bustling to and fro throughout Paris, is shot in 35 mm. black-and-white film, and it is simply gorgeous to the eye, with nighttime scenes that evoke the same atmosphere, allure, and sheen as that in Jean-Pierre Melville's great film Bob le Flambeur. There's also good reason for the black-and-white: Edgar's backer (Remo Forlani) is buying up works of art, part of a collection that was scattered during the war, and at one point he's shown two paintings to examine -- identifying the paintings, and who they are by, is another matter, since the cinematography, of course, takes away all the color so that they're practically reduced to daubs and splashes. The artwork is simply something else of value that's traded and handed about, like currency and stocks, without any individual identity.

Edgar is seen seeking out and talking to a woman (Cécile Camp), whom he tracks down working as a custodian in a train yard, cleaning out the empty passenger cars -- he seems to want to talk her into appearing, in some capacity, in his project, and she keeps, gently but assuredly, saying "no." Edgar knows the woman from somewhere before -- something the film reveals, at the one hour mark, when it jumps back in time to two years earlier, and Godard shifts gears from film to digital video, which is introduced into In Praise of Love with nothing short of a blast of color -- the effect is near-ravishing. The woman, Berthe, is the granddaughter of the couple who were former Resistance fighters -- she is at their home when the Americans visit because she works in a law office in Paris. Edgar meets her when he visits Brittany to interview people as part of a project regarding Catholics who worked in the Resistance. Berthe receives, as a gift, a copy of Robert Bresson's book "Notes on the Cinematograph" (part of a running, and beautiful, homage Godard makes to Bresson throughout the film), from which she reads a quote about how feelings should bring about events, and not the other way around. Edgar is also seen carrying with him, as if it were a talisman or a guide, a copy of the works of Simone Weil. Godard's inclusion of this book in the film is not arbitrary, as aspects of Weil's life turn out to have a lot to do with how In Praise of Love has been shaped. Weil, during her brief life period (1909-43), started out as a proletarian activist and ended up becoming a spiritual philosopher; she dropped out of the teaching profession to work for a time as a factory worker; Weil's Jewish family fled from France for the U.S. (by way of Casablanca) in 1942, but the following year Simone went to the U.K. to work for the Free French forces headquartered there. She succumbed to tuberculosis in a British sanitarium in 1943, during which she refused to eat, believing that what she did not eat would, instead, go to help her compatriots in occupied France. (One cannot help but make comparisons between this life arc and that of Godard's career, as well. Starting out as a filmmaker and polemicist, Godard became radicalized in the second part of the 1960s, set up a filmmaking collective that would turn out films for the workers, and, when that failed, retreated for a time to work on experimental videos, reemerging as a feature filmmaker in the 1980s whose films began addressing spiritual matters, most notably in 1985's Hail, Mary and 1994's Helas pour Moi.)

At the start of In Praise of Love, Edgar's project, he professes to the varied and sundry people whom he meets with, is to be about the four stages of love. Or about the four ages of love, love as experienced by the very young to the very old. We then learn that Edgar started out with an exact, and potentially vibrant, idea, but then, gradually, lost his way with it -- it became stale and flat, something that he simply continued to work on by rote. The project became divorced from its essence, and isolated -- in the same way that Edgar's work in Paris isolates him from the possibility of a love that was unrealized in Brittany. (He doesn't even find out until later that he and Berthe took the same train back to Paris.) Elsewhere in the film, people speak of how "resistance" -- that is, resistance to apathy, alienation, programmed indifference -- can be achieved only through "memory or universality." Godard does not seek to kick anyone out of the boat, or send anyone off to stand with their nose in the corner. In order to keep both the past and the present alive and vital, he calls for us to come together and not grow apart, from the lessons of history, the artistic voices of those past, or from each other. Now in his early 70s, Godard expresses an urgency which most moviemakers nowadays can only dream of attaining.

In Praise of Love has been criticized in some quarters as being "murky." I can only assume these comments were made by people whose heads were in burlap bags. The film has come not to bury cinema, but to give us a reason to become excited about it, again.

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