Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (38 page)

I had come out of the hospital. It was a painful moment. I had lost the taste for life at that time. In the meantime I had lost weight, I wasn’t doing well, neither in my head nor in my body. It’s true: the film saved my life. I had no more desire to live. I was doing very, very badly. This film saved my life.
¹⁵

Godard amplified Karina’s vulnerability in luminous close-ups and demanding long takes. Her struggle to hold herself together emanates a poignant frailty and translucency that arouses sympathy, less for the character (whom Karina rightly called “a crook, and none too clever”)
¹⁶
than for the actress herself. Indeed, when the film was shown in the 1964 New York Film Festival on the same night as
A Woman Is a Woman
, many viewers even failed to recognize that the earlier film’s exuberant dancer and the new film’s yearning, tremulous adolescent were played by the same woman.

The film’s basic triangle is established in the first sequence. Franz, accompanied by Arthur, drives a convertible sports car on a long, desolate suburban road along a riverbank and leaps from his seat to point out Odile, whom he sees riding by on her bicycle. Godard, in a voice-over commentary, sets the scene as both omniscient narrator and interested party: “My story starts here. Just about two weeks after having met Odile, Franz is driving Arthur out to Joinville to see the house.” The story is a romantic disaster foretold, as Arthur soon announces brusquely to Franz, “I’ll make her whenever I feel like it.” And indeed, just after the two men track Odile down at a private English class in a comically grim, bare classroom where Franz had first met her, Arthur ensnares her with his aggressively seductive banter.

The English lesson they attend is a formidable, bittersweet comic set piece in which Godard shows off his classical culture as well as its inescapable personal relevance. The teacher is played by the veteran actress Danièle Delorme, who puts her theatrical diction to lofty use by reciting passages from
Romeo and Juliet
, translated into French, which her adult students must then translate back into English. With the canny choice of citations that comprise her text, Godard in effect rewrote the play to make it resemble the story of his life with Karina. The teacher begins with Act 5, where one lover finds the other dead.

I will kiss thy lips
,
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them
To make me die with a restorative
.

Delorme then attributes to Juliet a line originally Romeo’s, regarding “some vile forfeit of untimely death”—a line accompanied by close-ups of Karina and Frey, two actors who, in real life, had made widely reported suicide attempts.

The teacher’s recitation comes to an end, during a shot of Anna Karina, with a line delivered in an undertone of afterthought, “O Fortune, Fortune! all men call thee fickle.” It is as if Godard had made Delorme say this line both to the character played by Karina, Odile, whom Arthur will seduce, and to Karina herself, whose unstable relationship with Godard was the director’s obsessional master plot.

Odile yields to Arthur, going off with him by métro as Godard, on the sound track, calls their trip to the St. Michel station a descent to “the center of the world”—a citation from Giraudoux’s story “La Méprise.” The sequence ends with Godard’s masochistic shot of Karina in bed with Brasseur—rather, Odile in bed with Arthur—while Franz is shown at home, sleeping alone.

Ultimately, the impulsive Arthur is killed, and Odile ends up with Franz. Godard described this happy ending in terms of Odile’s newfound maturity: “Odile obviously goes first to the more brilliant of the two. And then afterward, she discovers Franz, who is more solid, but who doesn’t have appearances in his favor.” He also spoke of Odile’s dalliance with Arthur as a dialectical stage in her life with Franz: “They have come to terms with themselves. They needed Arthur to come into their lives for them to arrive at this point.”
¹⁷

As with the characters in the film, so with Godard and Karina: all’s well that ends well, as art and life coincide. During the making of
Band of Outsiders
, he and Karina reconciled, moving into a new apartment in the Latin Quarter. Decorated in high style, the duplex was the subject of a celebrity–news photo spread in
Paris-Match
.
¹⁸

T
HOUGH THE DRAMA
of
Band of Outsiders
is conventional, Godard depicted it strikingly. Coutard’s photography coalesced with Godard’s careful choice of locations to produce an almost tactile attachment to place, from the gritty working district of the rue St.-Antoine in the eleventh arrondissement to the banks of the Marne on the road to Joinville, from the nocturnal glow of the place Clichy to the mysterious depths of the métro.

He also adorned it with several notable set pieces, such as the trio’s attempt to set a new world record for the fastest dash through the Louvre and their snazzily foot-stomping, hand-clapping line dance in a café, a popular step called the Madison (which the actors, who were not natural dancers, rehearsed daily for a month). It also offers Godard’s wistfully romantic tribute
to Karina, set on a moving métro car, in which Odile speaks to Arthur of marriage (Arthur responds coolly); after they observe a melancholy traveler on the train, Odile, framed by Godard in a moody close-up, sings in a half whisper a poem by Aragon about romance among the struggling folk of the city. The camera’s ardent gaze at Karina matched the sentimental nostalgia of Godard’s tribute to survivors of the daily grind.

Godard likened
Band of Outsiders
to
A Woman Is a Woman
for its “common,” working-class characters whom he presented as “somewhat cartoonish”
¹⁹
—in other words, relatively inarticulate people cut off from the filmmaker’s own intellectual life and vocabulary. Soon after making the film, Godard did what he had done for
A Woman Is a Woman:
he immediately produced a revision that better reflected his deeper inclinations. For
A Woman Is a Woman
, that revision was the unreleased record based on the film’s sound track; for
Band of Outsiders
, it was a text called “My Characters” that Godard wrote for promotional use.
²⁰
In it, he fused the characters and the actors who play them—“Odile” Karina, “Arthur” Brasseur, and “Franz” Frey—spinning around them an elaborate web of literary and cinematic references as well as subtle psychological analyses that give them a depth and a “reflective” dimension that were missing from the film itself. Likening Odile to Hardy’s Tess, to the Ottilie—in French, Odile—of Goethe’s
Elective Affinities
, and to a host of characters and actresses from classic movies, Godard wrote that she “reacts to the entreaties of the world in a purely animal way, without obvious logical reason”—in other words, like Bardot’s Camille in
Contempt
. Arthur, he wrote, “believes in stage sets and in appearances, in Billy the Kid as in Cyd Charisse,” calling him “a boy for whom life is totally stripped of mystery, but with all the poetry implied by the word ‘total.’” Godard reserved for Franz his own chosen destiny: “Franz is strong and original, in our era corrupted by the bureaucrats’ I.B.M.s, for having kept intact the reserves of imagination lauded by the Surrealists.”

In this elaborate retelling, Godard suggests regretfully what the film could have been, and was not.
Band of Outsiders
, which was conceived for practical ends, had a personal significance for him that exceeded its cinematic importance. He was the first to acknowledge the film’s flaws, at first with hints and later unrestrainedly—and many of his most perceptive viewers also voiced their reservations.

T
HEN THE FILM
was shown at the Cannes festival, out of competition, in early May 1964, Godard did his duty as a producer with grim good humor, putting on the forced smile of the self-promoting salesman. He took out a two-page ad in the special Cannes issue of
Le Film français
, which featured the following bit of puffery: “What does the movie-going public want? said
Griffith. A revolver and a girl! It is in response to this desire that I have shot and Columbia is distributing
Band of Outsiders
, a story of gold which will sell lots of tickets. [Signed] Jean-Luc Godard.”

However, Godard’s cynicism was perceived at once: in an on-the-spot roundup of the films shown at Cannes,
Cahiers du cinéma
’s Luc Moullet, one of the subtlest and most enthusiastic of Godard’s critics, wrote, “This offhanded overflight recalls Godard’s sole failure,
Une Femme coquette
(1955), now forgotten.”
²¹

In early July,
Band of Outsiders
was shown out of competition at the Berlin festival, where it was received warmly, but at its screening at the Locarno festival on July 29, it was whistled at, booed. When it opened in Paris on August 5—during the great lull of the Parisian vacation period—not only did it fail at the box office, but it was rejected, either with open hostility or quiet bewilderment, by many critics who to that point had been among Godard’s staunch defenders. A young
Cahiers
critic, Jacques Bontemps, concluded, with a shrug, that
Band of Outsiders
“remains on the margin”
²²
of Godard’s oeuvre. The wider press was less guarded. Claude Tarare, in
L’Express
, declared that “King Godard is naked.”
²³
And in
Les Lettres françaises
, Alain Vanier called the film the “self-criticism of an author in the process of plagiarizing himself.”
²⁴

D
URING THE SHOOT
of
Band of Outsiders
, Godard, newly reconciled with Anna Karina, bought the rights to what he called a “Lolita-style”
²⁵
crime novel,
Obsession
, by the American writer Lionel White, translated into French as
Le Démon de onze heures
.
²⁶
It was the story of a young middle-aged executive who takes off with a teenage girl, his children’s babysitter, on a cross-country spree of lust and crime. What Godard had in mind was to represent his own desperate obsession with Karina, starting from when she herself was a teenager. He wanted the film to star Michel Piccoli and the nineteen-year-old Sylvie Vartan, who was one of France’s most popular female pop stars. However, Vartan turned Godard down, and he put the project aside. He also conceived a new film for Karina herself to act in,
La Boniche
(The Servant Girl), which she described as “the story of a little domestic maid who disembarks from the provinces, suffers a lot of misfortunes, and finally kills herself.”
²⁷
Its pointed personal allusions were painfully obvious. But the collaboration would be deferred, and the reconciliation short-lived. Karina accepted a role in Jean Aurel’s
De l’amour
, which was filmed in April 1964, and a starring role in
Noël au soleil
(Christmas in the Sun) alongside the actor Maurice Ronet, who was also making his debut as a director. Karina and Ronet had an affair; Godard and Karina separated and filed for divorce.

As usual, Godard’s response to the crisis was cinematic: he repudiated the
careful methods and the neoclassicism of
Band of Outsiders
and renounced the separation of “instinctive” and “reflective” elements. He would again try to combine them. Closing the book on the failed experiment of trying to separate them, he placed
Band of Outsiders
in a different category from his other films: “That’s why I called it ‘Bande à Part.’ It’s really apart, it won’t change anything, it’s a diversion,
Bande à Part
.”
²⁸

Filming close-ups of hands (©
George Pierre/Sygma/Corbis
)

nine.

A MARRIED WOMAN

“Even the sex life is not their own”

I
N MAY 1964, WHILE AT CANNES PRESENTING
BAND OF OUT-
siders
, Godard told a journalist, “Why am I at Cannes? Well, because I was a little bit bored and a little bit sad, I came and I feel at ease… I’m a little bit like those husbands who leave their wives to go to the café and do some coffeehouse strategizing.”
¹
He was strategizing to get back to work: at Cannes, Luigi Chiarini, the director of the Venice Film Festival, expressed to Godard his regret at not being able to premiere
Band of Outsiders
there (the festival would run from August 27 through September 10).
²
In response, Godard offered to make another film that would be finished in three months, in time to debut at Venice.