Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (115 page)

With
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard turned the unquenchable flow of meditations and associations that he had channeled into
Histoire(s) du cinéma
—and specifically, those concerning history—toward his feature filmmaking, but to an entirely different end. Having completed the
Histoire(s)
—the product of a twenty-five-year quest to realize, on film, a fifty-year identification of himself and the cinema—he made
Eloge de l’amour
as radically different from his recent work as those films were from his work of the 1960s.

In
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard fulfilled in fiction the project of uniting his personal history and the history of cinema with political and social history. He used classical cinematographic means and modern video technology to join audiovisual history with the traces of his own earlier self. The film’s dramatic narrative would reach back to his earlier experiences while looking ahead to a world of diminished cinematic possibilities in which fragments of cinematic history would nonetheless persist and endure—albeit in other spheres.
Eloge de l’amour
is a film of history in which the past is revealed to live in the present, as in
Shoah
. Godard depicts the attempt to live
with a full consciousness of the presence of ambient history, and this effort becomes a motor of fiction more powerful than the nonreflexive fiction of
Schindler’s List
. Moreover, honor is paid to a living heroine, Lucie Aubrac, of the French Resistance, by a much greater intellectual and emotional fidelity to her complex and ambiguous experience than in Berri’s naturalistic hagiography—as well as by the attempt to draw out the present-day implications of her life and struggle.

The thematic and formal originality of
Eloge de l’amour
was reflected in the practical aspects of its production.
Eloge de l’amour
was constructed with greater forethought than any other film Godard had made. The draft scripts evolved drastically, indeed unrecognizably, from the original impulse that gave rise to the story; the shoot stretched out over the longest period of any in Godard’s career; and, taking great care with casting, Godard found actors, and in particular, a young lead actor, with whom he could finally do extensive preparatory work regarding the film’s intellectual substance as well as diction and performance.

After
Breathless
and
Sauve qui peut, Eloge de l’amour
would be Godard’s third first film. It fulfilled the promise of the title: its love story is Godard’s least inhibited and most ardent. And the sinuous, exacting processes by which it developed, from version to version of the script and from conception to realization, indicated his extraordinary care and devotion to the film, as if it ran the risk of being also his last.

In the earliest version of the scenario for
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard described a story in which “an older man leaves a younger woman for an older one and is happier.”
¹⁶
There, the plot is centered on the young woman, who shoots the man when he leaves her. The second version, the one rejected by Bérangère Allaux and Jacques Bonnaffé, involved a book editor who wants to publish a first novel by a young woman, Katyusha, a Russian ex-prostitute who is in jail for the shooting. In a notably self-pitying self-reference by Godard to himself and Miéville, the older man, Franck, ends up with the older woman, Yvonne, homeless but happy.
¹⁷
(Regarding that version, with its sex and violence, Godard said, “It’s very bad, it’s horrible; fortunately I didn’t make it.”)
¹⁸

For the third version, composed after the departure of Allaux and Bonnaffé, Godard extracted and distilled several essential elements of the original story, primarily the problem of age difference. It was extremely schematic, with twelve sequences about three couples, young, adult, and elderly, who separate and then get back together again. This version, too, was abandoned, though traces of it remain in the final film, including the story of a young couple, Perceval and Eglantine, who meet at a political protest and reunite while volunteering at a homeless shelter.

The names are taken from Godard’s reading: Perceval is from Robert Walser’s novel
La Rose
, from which Godard cites that character’s declarations of love (“I love you so much, you are so much there all the time, you exist so strongly for me, forever, that it is from now on pointless for me to see you again; since you will always be there, whatever happens”). Eglantine, from the eponymous novel by Jean Giraudoux, is a servant girl who turns into a woman of the world, first becoming the lover of Moïse, a Jewish banker, and then leaving him for Fontranges, a landed French aristocrat.

Eglantine’s Jewish connection is evident in the first scene of Godard’s synopsis: she is attending a protest while wearing a yellow star sewn on her jacket, and Perceval meets her in the grocery store where she seeks refuge after she has been beaten by counter-demonstrators. (The pairing of the two names is itself an act of historical montage: both books were published at approximately the same time—
La Rose
in 1925;
Eglantine
in 1927.)

As ever, when Godard found himself without a theme to orient a project, he turned to the cinema: the fourth version of
Eloge de l’amour
, dated May 1998, had a new title,
Voulez-vous faire du cinéma?
(Do You Want to Do Cinema? or Do You Want to Be in Pictures?). It comprised two sections, the first with that title, the second to be called
Eloge de l’amour
. And it began with the story of a young couple, Ludovic and Isabelle, who are engaged to be married.

In the first section, Ludovic and Isabelle quarrel and separate after an acrimonious weekend at the home of Isabelle’s grandparents. The grandparents, who had been illustrious activists in the French Resistance, have received an offer from Steven Spielberg to buy the rights to their life story. Isabelle, a beginning actress, approves, hoping there might be something in it for her; the young man disapproves, breaks the engagement, and leaves.

In the second section, a man in Paris, who is heard but not seen, is seeking actors for a project called
Eloge de l’amour
. His assistant helps him look for a young woman he had once known, a waitress who “seemed interesting to him, very demanding but without arrogance.” It turns out to be the same Isabelle. The man finds her working as a cleaning woman, but fails to persuade her to take part in the film, and accompanies her to the métro. They pass before a plaque dedicated to the memory of a “keeper of the peace officer [a policeman] killed by the Germans” and she declares, “It shouldn’t be written like that.” He never sees her again; sometime later, he learns that she has died of tuberculosis.

This version of
Eloge de l’amour
, much of which went into the final film, is transfigured by history: Godard streamed into it an extraordinary amount of political history, personal history, and the history of cinema. He selected Brittany as the site of the grandparents’ house for reasons both personal and
political. That part of France is where he went on his childhood summer vacations with his family (“I think that childhood vacations have unconscious and psychological repercussions in a man’s life”).
¹⁹
It also has special significance for the French Resistance, as Godard explained: “I chose Brittany in reference to Breton sailors who were the first to leave for London and join de Gaulle. Land of Catholicism, it also is the cradle of Colonel Rémy, the great resister and founder of the Confrérie Notre-Dame,” a Catholic resistance group.
²⁰

The new story was also marked by an encounter that had affected Godard a few years earlier. After seeing
Hélas pour moi
in 1994, a young woman from Bordeaux, Isabelle C., wrote to him. In response, Godard asked to meet her. She was a young woman in difficult straits; having broken with her family as a teenager, she had not finished her schooling. She was a prodigious autodidact of literature and cinema; she had an unusual speculative aptitude and an intense, peremptory tone of voice. She wrote with an energized emotional immediacy. She was hardly working, getting by with odd jobs and manual labor. She came to Paris to see Godard and wondered why he chose to respond to her letter among the hundreds that he must surely receive; he answered that he found her writing “exalted.” He asked her why people seek to make personal contact with artists they admire: “If I saw Dostoyevsky in the street, I wouldn’t invite him to have a coffee.” She asked Godard for a job. He told her, “It’s not that easy,” and asked her what type of work she thought she could do for him. After hours of discussion, much of it centered on literature, the meeting ended, with Godard offering to pay for her ticket back to Bordeaux.
²¹
Much of what Godard saw in Isabelle C. made its way into the film.

The other crucial addition to Godard’s fourth version of the story is the figure of the artist, the man in Paris, who appears only in the shadows—a stand-in for Godard.
Eloge de l’amour
became a film about Godard attempting to make a film about people who were involved with Steven Spielberg. The actual shadow-“project” of the shadow-creator resembled the third version of
Eloge de l’amour
, concerning three couples, young, adult, and elderly, but with one caveat, which he wrote into the new scenario: though he had no trouble identifying young people and old people, depicting “adults,” he said, was difficult.

If one sees them at a protest, for instance, one doesn’t say, ‘There go adults protesting.’ One says: truck drivers, teachers, nurses. One must add their role (their job) in society to define the adult. That’s not so for the young or the old. So, farewell documentary and hello Hollywood.

Meaning, farewell to a film based on Godard’s own personal experience of reality, and hello to a film that is governed not by the facts but by a scripted preconception.

The question of youth and age followed on the problem, suggested in
Hélas pour moi
, regarding the handing-down of an artistic tradition. In
For Ever Mozart
, Godard had filmed age differences despairingly, as the old director in effect cannibalized the young to nourish his art, and the young, un-informed by the artistic practice of their elders, made poor use of their noble passions. Now, in
Eloge de l’amour
, Godard began with a story of predatory youth—a reflection of Bérangère Allaux’s devastating effect on him—and ended up making a film about the tragic burden of his artistic legacy as endured by the young.

T
HE WITHDRAWAL
of Allaux and Bonnaffé in early 1997 had left Godard in a state of doubt and the project dangling. He soon met, through an agent, the young actress Marie Desgranges, and considered her for the part of Eglantine, but then told her that the shoot was off. Two years later, he asked her to come to his office, listened to her read a text by Brecht, and signed a contract with her for a shoot that would run from September through November 1999.
²²
His expectations went far beyond the usual: he told Desgranges that he wanted to learn how an actress “enters the inner life,” and so, he asked her personal questions (warning her, “You must tell me everything, or else it’s worthless”) and wanted her to question him frankly in return. She spoke freely with him and considers that she fell into his “trap.”
²³
Godard fired her shortly before the start of the shoot.

Marie Desgranges’s name does not appear in the credits of
Eloge de l’amour
, but two shots of her appear in the film—camera tests, done by the crew in Godard’s absence, on a bench in the streets of Paris. In those images, she resembles, with her furtive, wounded look, lean angularity, and involuted ferocity, Isabelle C. These two images, live-action pentimenti, have a valedictory quality, reflecting Godard’s nostalgic curiosity about the film that might have been made with Desgranges as well as a farewell to the woman, who, in a single brief meeting, left such a deep and substantial mark on the film.

Godard filled the role of the assistant to the unnamed artist with a non-actor who had made a big impression on him in another domain. In late 1998, Godard wrote to Philippe Loyrette, the writer who had sent him a videocassette of his chant of Robert Brasillach’s “Testament,” the performance on which the video
Adieu au TNS
was based. He admitted that he had lost Loyrette’s cassette but said that he had recently recovered it—and had clipped a moment of the incantation into a re-edited version of
Histoire(s) du
cinéma
, a cassette of which he enclosed.
²⁴
In addition, he invited Loyrette to play the role of Philippe, the assistant in
Eloge de l’amour
, and to intone Brasillach’s text on-screen in the course of the film.
²⁵

But the actor who would play the young creator proved hard to find. In February 1999, Godard saw a film by Jean-Claude Guiguet,
Les Passagers
(The Passengers), was impressed by its young lead, Bruno Putzulu, and invited him to his Paris office. When Putzulu arrived, Godard immediately asked whether he might videotape him while they spoke. He gave Putzulu a text to read aloud; after the recitation, Godard praised him for having delivered it “without adding anything.” The next day, Godard called to offer him the part—explaining that the actor would remain off-screen and be only heard on the sound track in discussion with other performers.

Putzulu was an authentic young star—he had just received the 1999 César award for “jeune espoir masculin” (most promising actor).
²⁶
Yet he had no objection to Godard’s plan, which, ultimately, was abandoned, since Putzulu appears on-screen in a true starring role.
²⁷