Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (119 page)

In some ways, the fate of
Eloge de l’amour
had been foretold in the reception given to another project with which Godard was intimately associated during the long gestation of
Eloge
, Anne-Marie Miéville’s film
Après la réconciliation
(After the Reconciliation). As with
Eloge de l’amour
, the substance of Miéville’s film was subordinated—by critics and audiences—to Godard’s involvement, resulting in a lack of appreciation of its intrinsic artistic merits.

Après la reconciliation
, which Miéville had initially written as a play, is essentially a chamber work for four characters: two women (one, an older unnamed intellectual, the other, Cathos, a young dancer) and two men (Robert, an intellectual, and Arthur, a young sailor). Miéville had originally wanted the actor Pierre Richard to play Robert. He withdrew from the project, however, and Godard offered to take on the role. As Miéville recalled, “Jean-Luc felt himself to be in harmony with the script, he wanted to say those words, to participate in this enterprise. He insisted on acting. I was not in favor of it, because we had already done the previous one together, be

In Sarajevo, Rony Kramer and Godard talk about Israel.
(
TCD-Prod DB © Les Films Alain Sarde / DR
)

cause his name was a burden and because I was reproached for using it as a kind of advertising.”
¹
Godard’s “harmony with the script” was no surprise: Mièville had modeled the dialogue between Robert and the unnamed woman on the dialogue between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in
La Cérémonie des adieux
.

The shoot was scheduled to take place in the spring of 2000, so Godard interrupted the editing of
Eloge de l’amour
for it. Though he had previously stepped in at the last minute to play the lead role in Miéville’s
Nous sommes tous encore ici
in 1996, that performance required little preparation on his part; as he recalled, “I was able to find much of myself in it, so it sufficed to pay attention, to concentrate, to be serious, to be as I am.”
²
For
Après la réconciliation
, Miéville put Godard through a month of rehearsals. Several days before the start of the shoot, when the actress slated to play the first, unnamed woman withdrew from the project, Miéville herself decided to take on the role, which was closely paired with Godard’s part.

In the film’s principal story, the older couple, riding in a car in the city (she, Miéville, is driving; he, Godard, is the passenger), meet by chance a friend, Cathos, and bring her to their calm and subtly luxurious apartment. The group lacks beverages; the first woman, Miéville, goes to get them. While she is out, she meets a solitary wanderer named Arthur; she kisses him and brings him along with her. Meanwhile, Cathos attempts to seduce Robert, unsuccessfully. Miéville arrives with Arthur; in a long and sharp-edged conversation that soon turns to insult, Arthur leaves, and Cathos leaves to pursue him.

Left alone with Robert, the first woman confesses that she kissed Arthur. Robert withdraws to a bedroom, where she finds him crying. Their confrontation is horrific and moving, as Robert tells her, “But really, at your age, you don’t need to be loved anymore.” Miéville reviews with him the story of their life together, starting when they were young, when “the whole soul, the whole heart, and also the imagination desired that something happen, thought it possible,” whereas now “the heart has started to weigh heavily, so heavy and large that it finally fills the whole body.” Robert sits silently, unwilling to respond to Miéville’s litany of recriminations, until she challenges him, “Dirty bastard! It would take just one sentence for you to set me free! Say it! Say the sentence!” Robert can only respond with, “Oh la la, how painful it is to finish interminable sentences.” Miéville can take no more. “Then beat it!” she yells. “Say your fucking sentence and beat it, Robert, please, my good Robert, but say your sentence.” He breaks down in brutalized, deeply rising sobs, considers leaving and not coming back, and finally, exhausted, tells her, “You see, you want me to talk but you don’t want to hear what I’m saying… In the end, you’re so tyrannical.”

In an epilogue, they are together and, going out for a drink, run into Cathos and Arthur. The two couples go to the theater and discuss, with fragile serenity and Apollonian good cheer, life “after the reconciliation.”

While less spontaneous and less naturally intimate than
Nous sommes tous encore ici
, which has the feel of permutations of Godard and Miéville’s actual domestic discussions,
Après la réconciliation
, with its dancelike formality and its highly constructed dialogue and situations, lays bare inner lives, ravaging fears, suppressed ecstasies, and frightening desires, with an extraordinarily controlled gracefulness.

Yet as if to set the theatrical drama in its authentic context, Miéville begins
Après la réconciliation
with an agonized prologue, a kind of home movie of herself visiting her grandchildren, accompanied by her own voice-over confession: “On this day in’ 99, I have an appointment with the maid to bring the youngest girl a dress I made for her birthday.” She continues, “I only see them rarely. The door seems to be closed, but I must stay there in case it opens, in case it doesn’t.” Miéville made it clear that she could visit her grandchildren only when her daughter was not at home.

Godard had already made this estrangement public, in the second volume of
Jean-Luc Godard by Jean-Luc Godard
. As Alain Bergala was editing the book, Godard, without further explanation, gave him a copy of a letter for inclusion. The letter is eight pages long, handwritten, dated August 2, 1995. Though the names are blackened out, initials remain, and it begins, “Very dear A—,” a reference to Miéville’s daughter, Anne. The letter is Godard’s plea for permission to see her children (she had four). He admits that he is “only the friend of the grand parent [
sic
] of [the] small children,” and acknowledges with sadness that neither she nor her “companion” want him to know them—despite his having been named godfather of one of them.

The alienation had been established for years. Anne-Marie Faux, who worked as what she called the “secretary” to Miéville and Godard in the Paris office of Peripheria from 1990 through 1995, recalled, “Anne-Marie Miéville’s relations with her daughter were full of conflict. While I was working with them, her daughter did not see her—and so [Miéville] did not see her grandchildren either…. nor did Godard.”
³
Godard himself later attested to the troubled state of Miéville’s family relations—“She had difficulties with her daughter to have the right to see her grandchildren”
⁴
—and even credited this problem with inspiring his own work regarding the bond of grandparents and grandchildren in
Eloge
.
⁵
Miéville, however, bravely framed her work of fiction with an explicit glimpse of her real and intimate grief.

Après la réconciliation
is a significant work of art, but for all of Miéville’s accomplishment, it was received as a film dominated by the image of Godard,
as if it were a star vehicle. Indeed, the interest in Godard’s person at the expense of his and Miéville’s cinema was not only nourished by this project, but was also heightened by Godard’s efforts on the film’s behalf.
Après la réconciliation
was scheduled to be released in Paris on December 27, 2000, and Godard worked with Miéville to help promote it, granting joint interviews and accompanying her and the film at a screening and discussion with high-school students in rural Sarlat, a widely reported event. Though
Après la réconciliation
was taken seriously, Godard’s on-screen tears were its most generally remarked element.

Miéville’s work with Godard did draw some admirers, however. When Mary Lea Bandy of the Museum of Modern Art in New York decided to commission a video about MOMA from Godard, Colin MacCabe of the British Film Institute, a partner in the enterprise, said that he preferred Godard’s recent work with Miéville to what Godard was doing on his own. “That’s why,” he recalled, “when we were commissioning
The Old Place
, I specified that he do it with her.”
⁶
The film was budgeted at $500,000, which Godard assumed would be easy money. “Well, I thought, $500,000 for a film that we’ll finish in two weeks, not bad,” he recounted. “But it took us a year to figure out what to do, to find the images, to choose the texts, et cetera. Then after taxes, the cost of production, what’s left?”
⁷

Rather than come to New York to film at MOMA, Godard and Miéville filmed at home, on the subject of art, using reproductions as well as their own documentary footage of contemporary art installations (including a machine by Jean Tinguely and a vast installation of used clothing by Christian Boltanski). Through their voice-over dialogue, Godard and Miéville explore their ideas on the virtues of classical art and modern art’s fallen status, linking the critical failure of the movies to document the Holocaust to the process of artistic devolution that ran from painting to photography to cinema. In the process, they considered, art itself had been emptied of its documentary virtues.

The central idea of
The Old Place
is to unify political morality with visual aesthetics. Godard and Miéville use texts and works by artists in order to analyze art visually into two components: a lesson in looking at the world, whether a field of flowers or the way the light hits one’s living-room furniture, and the documentation of suffering; and their argument is that the two are inseparable.

The point was amplified in a second short film by Godard,
Dans le noir du temps
(In the Dark of Time), which was premiered at the Pompidou Center in Paris on November 28, 2001, together with
The Old Place
(MOMA did not show the film until 2002).
Dans le noir du temps
had been made on commission from British producers for a series called
Ten Minutes Older
, in
which a number of directors made a film of their choice exactly ten minutes long. (The directors included Bernardo Bertolucci, Claire Denis, and István Szabó.) Godard took the commission at its word: he showed brief moments from his own films in order to illustrate “the last minutes” of essential qualities of existence. For the last minutes of youth, he showed Jean-Pierre Léaud in
Made in USA
, who is asked, “If you had to die, would you prefer to know in advance or to die immediately?” Léaud says, “Immediately,” and gets shot. The final minutes of compassion feature a montage that joins documentary footage from the war in the former Yugoslavia and pornography. The last minutes of thought are shown by black garbage bags being filled with books as Godard reads the titles, then the bags sitting in an alley and being picked up and thrown into a garbage truck (the only image actually shot for the film, Godard said). For “the last minutes of memory,” there is an image of naked, emaciated bodies thrown onto a pile, archival footage from the liberation of a concentration camp. The last minutes of silence are suggested by a scene of torture from
Le Petit Soldat
. The last minutes of beauty, from Godard’s
King Lear
, show Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald approaching the sea, moments before the death of Cordelia. The last minutes of cinema are shown by an art installation of a white screen writhing in agony (an image that had been included both in
The Old Place
and
Histoire(s) du cinéma
).

Miéville explained to the audience, “I told Jean-Luc that the film was too dark, I would have wanted to add something more optimistic, the last ten minutes of hypocrisy” or something else that people would be pleased to see come to an end; but Godard answered her, “We weren’t able to do it. It’s bin Laden’s fault.” The screening took place some two months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which Godard spoke of as a “horror.” However, in an interview, he criticized American and, for that matter, French television for showing the same footage, of the towers in flames and collapsing, repeatedly, but not showing victims leaping from the towers and falling to their death.
⁸
As with the Holocaust, so with 9/11: Godard wanted photographic evidence of human suffering in order to be certain of its reality.

Yet another short film,
The Origin of the 21st Century
, which had been commissioned by the Cannes festival for the year 2000, suggested the coexistence of the cinema with the political reality that, in his view, it existed to document. It was a brief synopsis of the twentieth century, recursively, from the end back to the beginning, as reflected in Godard’s own films and others. For the last decade, Godard included the image from
Hélas pour moi
of the violinist as Ludovic, walking in uniform, on his way to war, is followed by television images of a bus leaving Kosovo with fleeing refugees.
The year 1960 is shown by footage from the Algerian War, together with Jean Seberg at the end of
Breathless
asking, in response to Jean-Paul Belmondo’s dying words, “What does that mean, ‘disgusting’?” The film ends at a fictionalized 1900 with a scene from Max Ophüls’s
Le Plaisir
(from 1951), of an old man disguised as a young man, dancing himself to collapse, followed by a famous line from the same film: “Le bonheur n’est pas gai”—Happiness is not gay (also cited in
Eloge
). The century of cinema, and Godard’s thumbnail résumé of it, suggests the inverse: that the cinema’s gaiety reflects anything but happiness.