Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (55 page)

I am sure now, dear André Malraux, that you will understand absolutely nothing of this letter in which, submerged in hatred, I address you for the last time. Nor will you understand why from now on I will be loath to shake your hand, even in silence… It’s not surprising that you will not recognize my voice when I talk of the ban on
Suzanne Simonin, Diderot’s Nun
as an assassination. No. There is nothing surprising in your deep cowardice. You are putting your head in the sand to avoid your interior memories.
⁶
How could you hear me, André Malraux, since I am calling you from the exterior, from a distant country, from free France?
⁷

In both texts, Godard likened de Gaulle’s government to the Vichy regime. Although Malraux was not personally responsible for the ban, he did not speak out against it. Yet soon thereafter, Malraux (whether despite or because of Godard’s invective) took a decisive step in favor of the film: relying on a law that exempted Cannes screenings from French censorship, he ratified his handpicked commission’s endorsement of
La Religieuse
as one of the two official French entries to the festival.
⁸

At Cannes
La Religieuse
received prolonged applause from the audience and effusive praise from the critics. Meanwhile, Beauregard filed suit against the ban on procedural grounds and won. By the time the film was sent back to the censorship board for review, de Gaulle—who privately admitted that the “affair” was “silly”
⁹
—had brought in a new minister of information, Georges Gorce, who lifted the ban.
¹⁰
Released on July 26, 1967, the film proved to be both a critical success and a profitable venture.

The battle over
La Religieuse
, as de Gaulle himself recognized, held the French authorities up to ridicule and made them appear hopelessly out of touch with modern life. It foreshadowed the open conflict between young people with new expectations and the institutions that did not change rapidly enough to acknowledge and meet them. As Godard had understood since 1960, the New Wave’s aesthetic resistance to mainstream French culture redefined the terms of French politics, and Godard found himself in its vanguard.

E
ARLY IN 1966
, before receiving Anne Wiazemsky’s fervent missive, Godard had rekindled an old acquaintance. Marina Vlady, one of the younger stars of the Old Wave of French cinema, was among the many actresses Godard had considered for the lead role in
A Woman Is a Woman
. Born in 1938, Vlady was one of four daughters of a Russian émigré family that provided the French cinema with two of its leading figures (her older sister, Odile Versois, had been an esteemed and popular actress since the 1940s). Vlady had made her film debut at age eleven, and had been a star since age sixteen. She had
also been a tabloid sensation, marrying, at seventeen, the actor Robert Hossein. After her divorce at twenty-five, she married Jean-Claude Brouillet, a pilot. This marriage, too, was short-lived: separated from Brouillet, Vlady moved to her parents’ villa outside of Paris—both a family retreat and a Chekhovian center of Russian culture in exile—which is where she was living when she and Godard became reacquainted.

Vlady (who had three children) and Godard rapidly became friends, a couple of sorts (though, according to Vlady, a Platonic one).
¹¹
The liaison prompted Godard to conceive a new film project: an adaptation of
Le Lys dans la vallée
(
The Lily of the Valley
) by Balzac, the story of a poor but promising young Parisian, Felix de Vandenesse, and his desperate love affair with Madame de Mortsauf, a provincial beauty who is wasting her life with an ineffectual husband with whom she stays for the sake of their children. Following her early death, Felix seeks to marry the young Natalie de Manerville, who, after hearing the story of his life, refuses, considering him still devoted to his late beloved.

The project suggested a perfect on-screen pairing of Vlady with Jean-Pierre Léaud, who would stand in for Godard in a story that again paralleled his own situation, and doubly: first, regarding his love for a mature woman like Vlady, who had retreated to the family home in devotion to her children; and second, regarding the difficulty of restoring love to his life when he was so openly bearing the wounds from the loss of his previous beloved, Anna Karina. But in the spring of 1966, Godard and Vlady discovered an interest in an entirely different kind of story, one that emerged from the news.

That April, Vlady went to Japan to star in
Atout coeur à Tokyo pour OSS 117
(Hearts Are Trumps in Tokyo for OSS Agent 117), a French James Bond—style film. Godard arranged a trip to Japan that would coincide with her shoot, on the pretext of interviewing several Japanese directors for
Cahiers du cinéma
and presenting
Masculine Feminine
to a local audience.

He arrived in Japan on April 28, bringing Vlady what she later recalled as “lavish gifts: a Picasso drawing and two notebooks containing a story that he wrote and illustrated himself.”
¹²
He accompanied her to a Noh play and fell asleep; he bought her a record player and albums by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez as well as Bach’s
Brandenburg Concerti
.
¹³
He spoke about making a film of the life of Jesus, in which a beggar in the modern-day French provinces would be revealed as the Christ.
¹⁴

Official duties absorbed much of Godard’s time there, such as cocktail receptions and roundtable discussions. He was observed standing at the sidelines of one gathering, staring at Vlady, and biting his fingernails while she chatted with the guests.
¹⁵
During a trip to Kyoto to visit the grave of
Mizoguchi,
¹⁶
he turned up at a dinner party with a birthday gift for Vlady—a photo album containing an image of her on one side and Godard’s own drawing of a fox on the other—and explained to his hosts that the fox represented himself, since it was the “wisest and wittiest” of animals. Vlady, however, didn’t show up that evening.
¹⁷

Back in Tokyo, on the final leg of the trip, he and Vlady had the idea that changed their plans for the film, and he typed it up on his last day there.
¹⁸

In an issue of
Le Nouvel Observateur
published several weeks earlier, an article had appeared by the journalist Catherine Vimenet called “Les ‘étoiles filantes’” (“The ‘Shooting Stars’”).
¹⁹
The title referred to the name professional prostitutes had given to a new breed of part-time amateurs, women who lived in the vast housing complexes springing up around Paris. Facing high rents and bills for heat, water, electricity, and the new furniture they had been forced to buy on moving in (the authorities feared vermin), the women, who had nothing left for food, trawled workingmen’s cafés near the farmers’ market of Les Halles to earn money they would spend on the way home to feed their families.

Godard and Vlady had read and discussed the article when it came out. What sparked the idea for a new film was a later sidebar, appended to a follow-up roundtable discussion of sociologists. This item, titled “An Atrocious Document,” was a letter from an anonymous reader who told of being a single mother nearing forty, an educated but underpaid office worker who had begun to pick up male clients from a luxurious café, and who used the money to pay for twice-weekly visits to the hairdresser, to buy fine clothing, and to purchase her apartment.
²⁰

Godard and Vlady put aside
The Lily of the Valley
in favor of a film based on the “atrocious document” in a setting inspired by Vimenet’s article on prostitution in the housing projects.
²¹
The story Godard outlined for the film—
Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her)
—was built around a day in the life of a young woman, Juliette, who lives in a new apartment complex with her husband and young children, and who prostitutes herself by picking up men from the sumptuous Hôtel George V in order to buy designer dresses.

Though Godard set the film in a poor milieu, his story was more concerned with poverty of imagination, specifically, of a woman caught in the same net of illusions as all of Godard’s female characters since
A Married Woman
—the American-style promise of ease and pleasure, whether sexual or material, and the suppression of conscience and freedom that results from these enticements.

In Paris, Godard had producers waiting: Anatole Dauman, again joined
by Mag Bodard (the coproducer of
Au Hasard Balthazar
), both of whom were joined by Godard’s own production company, Anouchka, and by François Truffaut’s company, Les Films du Carrosse. Together they rounded up the film’s budget of nine hundred thousand francs, or $180,000, which was 50 percent higher than that of
Masculine Feminine
. The film would be shot in color and in Cinemascope, and Raoul Coutard would rejoin the crew as cameraman.

As the project advanced toward production, Godard faced a distraction that threatened to derail it. In June, he received Anne Wiazemsky’s dramatic confession of love. Not knowing where to find her, he called her mother and Mag Bodard, finally learning that she was on vacation in Avignon. Godard sent Wiazemsky a telegram there, proposing that they meet the next day in front of the town hall of the village of Montfrin, near Avignon, and he took off for the south. The rendezvous took place, but the timing was awkward, due to his involvement with Vlady. Several weeks later, Godard was again in the south of France, this time visiting Vlady, when he was tracked down by Beauregard, who did succeed in shifting his focus.
²²

Beauregard was in trouble: he could not pay bills that were coming due. He was, however, eligible for loans and credits if he made a film, and so he needed to start production on something immediately. He turned to Godard, flattering him with the notion that he was the only director who could conceive and organize a film quickly enough. Godard acknowledged that this was probably true, and accepted the challenge (in part because he himself could make use of his fee to pay off back taxes); he asked Beauregard for a few hours to find a story. Godard went into a bookstore and came out with a detective novel by Richard Stark (a pseudonym for Donald Westlake),
Rien dans le coffre
(Nothing in the Trunk, the French title for
The Jugger
). In the novel, a volume in Stark’s series about a hard-boiled criminal named Parker, the main character goes off on a search for an old acquaintance who knows too much.

It was out of the question for Godard to hire stars, because Beauregard couldn’t afford them. As a result, Godard relied on his “stock company” of friends, character actors, and actors from his own circles—Jean-Pierre Léaud, László Szabó, Yves Afonso, Ernest Menzer, Rita Maiden (Madame Cé-line in
A Married Woman
), Remo Forlani, the journalist Philippe Labro, the
Cahiers du cinéma
critics Sylvain Godet and Jean-Pierre Biesse—and, in the lead role, Anna Karina.

When Godard and Karina divorced, Godard feared for her financial situation and persuaded Beauregard to give her a three-year contract. The actress would receive ten thousand francs (two thousand dollars) per month, to come out of the fees she would earn in Godard’s films; her fees
for films by other producers were to be split with Beauregard. Thus, Karina was an economical hire for the producer, who did not have to take additional cash from his pocket for her services.

Beauregard announced, in an ad in the trade press of July 8, 1966, that he would produce
The Secret
, directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Anna Karina, which was scheduled to begin shooting on July 11. Godard described the film—immediately renamed
Made in USA
—as “the conjunction in my mind of three desires: to do a favor for a friend, to highlight the Americanization of French life, and to make use of one of the episodes in the Ben Barka affair.”
²³

The “Ben Barka affair” had begun almost a year earlier, on October 30, 1965, when
Le Monde
carried a brief article mentioning the mysterious arrest of Mehdi Ben Barka, the exiled leader of the left-wing Moroccan opposition and a major figure in international Marxist and anticolonialist politics. It was an arrest that the police denied making. Ben Barka had vanished, and his disappearance was at the center of the news for months, during which the French secret police was revealed to have conspired with the criminal underworld to deliver Ben Barka to Moroccan agents. Morocco’s minister of the interior, General Mohamed Oufkir, was reported to have visited the hideout where Ben Barka was being held and to have tortured him to death.

The public was shocked by the conspiracy, the crime, and the cover-up. The story had been one of Godard’s obsessions even before he had thought of filming it. In January 1966, on a break from editing
Masculine Feminine
, Godard told Michel Vianey that he had visited the
Le Monde
archives to catch up on the story, and said: “This morning when I woke up I wondered whether I had read that Ben Barka had been found or whether I’d dreamed it. I ended up getting lost in it.”
²⁴

As it happened, the Ben Barka affair was not only a Cold War battleground, it also involved the cinema. The bogus arrest had taken place on the boulevard St.-Germain as Ben Barka was on his way to meet a journalist, Philippe Bernier, and the filmmaker Georges Franju.
²⁵
Ben Barka planned to collaborate with them on a film about decolonization to be called
Basta!
He intended to use his Third World connections to open doors for Franju,
²⁶
and to cowrite the film’s commentary with Marguerite Duras.
²⁷