Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (57 page)

   I reproach those whom I call the elegant left for not recognizing the presence of this scientific object.
⁴³

Here Godard charged that the new aesthetic left—which he had long heralded and that had lately come to the fore and rallied around his films—was unable to keep up with the pace of his experiments in form (and indeed in formlessness). Insofar as his own artistic progressivism was, in his view, the touchstone for this new breed of leftists, he had traced a fault line between himself and them that would soon give way.

O
N AUGUST 8
, nine days after the end of principal photography on
Made in USA
, Godard began to shoot
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
. In the months that had intervened between the conception and the shoot of the film, he had intellectualized and abstracted the subject.

He planned to film the story of Juliette, the part-time prostitute, as a series of set pieces: on an unemployment line; through a case where a woman
commits suicide after prostituting herself for the first time; in an apartment where a man babysits children and rents his rooms to prostitutes in exchange for food; in a scene with a woman getting a permanent in a hair salon. He intended to film interviews, “real or fabricated,” with such characters as “the concierge who calls the police on a beatnik with long hair,… a real prostitute,… a young working woman who prefers to wear herself out in a factory rather than prostitute herself now and then,… a social worker.”
⁴⁴

However, Godard did not plan to organize these incidents in terms of a story, but through a philosophical grid. His scenario set out a four-part quasi-phenomenological analysis of the subject: “objective description” (of objects and subjects); “subjective description” (of people and things, such as “décor seen from the inside, where the world is outside”); the “search for structures” revealing “laws that must be discovered and applied in order to live in society” (a society, Godard adds, which is “too much inclined toward, and to, consumption”); and finally, what he calls “life,” or what the philosopher “Merleau-Ponty called the singular existence of a person, in the event, that of Juliette in particular.”
⁴⁵

This philosophically mediated view of the character of Juliette suggested that Godard approached the film—and Vlady—as abstractions. With his lead actress thus effaced, Godard would fill the film’s void with his own presence, turning this philosophical and sociological project into his most direct cinematic confessional to date.

The stakes in the partnership were high, both professionally and personally. While Godard was preparing to make
Made in USA
, Vlady went on vacation to Romania, to visit her boyfriend at the time. Godard drove her to the airport and, as she prepared to pass through the gate, he proposed marriage (shades of the corresponding scene in
Masculine Feminine
), asking for her answer upon her return.
⁴⁶
The news then leaked out; the day that shooting started for
Made in USA, L’Express
ran a squib: “Immediately after this fast-track film with his ex-wife, Jean-Luc Godard will undertake another, with Marina Vlady:
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
. There is a fourth thing he does not know yet: will she agree to become his wife?”
⁴⁷
Godard called his friend Roland Tolmatchoff—who was also a family friend of Vlady’s—and asked him to be their witness. Upon her return from Romania, Vlady held out hope; but not long after the start of work on
Two or Three Things
, she turned him down, and, according to Vlady, “they never really spoke again.”
⁴⁸

During the shoot, Godard again took up his idea of a documentary about his actors, eliciting their free responses to questions posed to them on-screen. He wrote some dialogue at the last minute; sometimes he gave it to
Vlady just before filming so that she could memorize it; other times he dictated it to her as the camera rolled. Vlady described the method.

I had a little speaker in my ear, and Godard would tell me right before the shot what I had to say… In general, he spoke a text through the little speaker, which I had to repeat at once. Often, he posed questions which I had to answer directly. These questions were often personal, so he would ask me, for instance: “Marina, how are you dressed today?” or “Marina, tell me who you are, try to discover yourself, to describe yourself.” So I had to answer him, but at the same time, there was a particular prepared dialogue. The questions always took me by surprise in the middle of a text I had learned. It was actually a real gymnastics of thought and I had to react very fast.
⁴⁹

One such scene took place in a clothing shop, where Juliette was considering buying a dress. Godard spoke to Vlady through the earpiece and she answered petulantly, as if his questioning was sarcastic: “Yes, I know how to talk… OK, let’s talk together.” He then fed her lines regarding the loss of the city’s “semantic richness”: “The creative and formative role of the city will be confirmed by other systems of communication… perhaps… television, radio, vocabulary and syntax, scientifically and deliberately…” The actress found Godard’s demands very difficult, and he was dissatisfied with her performance. He complained bitterly about her to his assistant director, Charles Bitsch, and to his editor, Agnès Guillemot, who later recalled watching the film’s rushes: “When, during the shoot, Godard said ‘Cut,’ she relaxed, became more open. He was unable to get her in this state during the shot.”
⁵⁰
Indeed, Vlady’s performance is tense yet false, whether due to her unease with Godard’s “provocative” methods, or with Godard himself, or with her notion of how to act such a part.

As the shoot progressed, Godard sought to make corrections to Vlady’s acting. He included on the call sheet dated August 18 a “Letter to My Friends to Learn to Do Cinema Together,” which Guillemot recognized at once to be an open plea to Vlady: “I play / You play / We play / At cinema / You think there is / A rule of the game…” Despite the plural of “friends” in the title, the text is written in the second person singular and familiar form,
tu; jouer
(to play), in French as in English, also refers to an actor playing a role, and the word for “game,”
jeu
, comes from the same root. Godard goes on to remind her that the “game” is “reserved for grown-ups” and yet that it’s “a children’s game.”

The letter was of no practical help to Vlady, who asked Godard for more concrete recommendations. Godard gave her one. He later told interviewers from
Cahiers du cinéma
about it:

Marina Vlady said to me one day: “What should I do? You never tell me anything.” I answered her (she lived in Montfort-L’Amaury): “Instead of taking a taxi to the shoot, all you have to do is come on foot. If you really want to act well, that’s the best thing to do.” She thought I was pulling her leg and she didn’t do it. I was really mad at her for that, and what’s more, I still am, a little.
⁵¹

Godard’s dissatisfaction only mounted. He complained to Charles Bitsch, “I don’t want to work with her anymore,”
⁵²
and as he continued working with her, he made his displeasure felt. The scenes he shot with Vlady are bland, unenergized, affectless—and the contrast is all the more striking with Godard’s highly inflected, dynamic filming of the other objects in view, whether cityscapes or consumer products, on which his mental and visual interest was intensely concentrated. He composed these shots more carefully than those featuring Vlady. The film’s most famous and remarkable sequence is a series of long extreme close-ups of a cup of espresso, seen from above, in which the bubbles (provoked by the visible addition of a cube of sugar) and the swirling pale foam against the coffee’s darkness imply a cosmos. The film’s last shot, of a magazine ad for Hollywood chewing gum featuring a tender young couple, from which the camera zooms back to reveal an array of gaily packaged French consumer goods spread out on a lawn and facing the camera as if singing in chorus, simultaneously suggests the rankest materialism as well as its charm. Godard’s devotion to filming these ordinary objects gives them a screen presence more memorable and more mysterious than that of his lead actress.

Another actress, however, gives an extraordinary performance in her one scene in
Two or Three Things
. In it, Robert (Juliette’s husband) starts a conversation with an unnamed young woman in a café where he is waiting for Juliette, who, unbeknownst to him, is with an American client in a hotel room. After the conversation starts off with banalities, Robert suggests, “Well then, just for five minutes, why not try to talk really about what interests us deeply?” For the subject of their conversation, Robert picks sex. The young woman, who speaks with a fierce natural intelligence and a presence unde-formed by theatrical mannerisms, turns the conversation around on Robert, asking him about his attitude toward his work.

The woman, Juliet Berto, was a nineteen-year-old who had met Godard in her native Grenoble when he went there to present
Les Carabiniers
. She would be a regular and crucial presence in Godard’s films for several years to come.

Two other memorable young women appear in the film: the eighteen
year-old Blandine Jeanson, who does a noteworthy turn in the same café scene as a student interviewing a character presented as “the Russian Nobel Prize-winner, Ivanov”; and Isabelle Pons, Godard’s assistant, who is seen standing among the gadgets and signs of a gas station. In making
Two or Three Things
, Godard surrounded himself with a trio of engaging young women who, above all, were comfortable being themselves on film. Next to them, Marina Vlady appeared as exactly what she was: an Old Wave actress who was playing the role of a star, a performer who did not know how simply to “be” on camera.

Agnès Guillemot understood the difficulty inherent in Godard’s working relationship with Vlady: “She was an experienced actress, and he had difficulty making contact with people, and at the same time he was then in love with her.”
⁵³
Though Vlady was twenty-eight—only two years older than Anna Karina—she had been a star since 1953; moreover, she had first married at age seventeen, and had three children. Her wealth of life experience induced Guillemot to recall, “It was very moving, because Godard was always in love with much younger girls, and here was a woman who was almost his own age.”
⁵⁴

T
HE SHOOT OF
Two or Three Things
found itself mixed up with additional shoot days for
Made in USA
, and when both ended, on September 8, 1966, Godard went right to the editing room—or rather, the adjoining editing rooms, where
Made in USA
was edited by his longtime editor, Guillemot, and
Two or Three Things
by her assistant, Françoise Collin.

Though Godard was no longer speaking to Marina Vlady, he certainly spoke
of
her, however, and did so promptly, in the film itself, in the form of a voice-over commentary. Guillemot recalled that at the time,“he was in a very bad mood”
⁵⁵
and that he found the writing of this commentary to be “very difficult.” Godard spoke it in a rushed, urgent whisper, as if he were furtively divulging secrets to each viewer personally—as indeed he was. But, as the title of the film suggests, the secrets he divulged were not only his own but also the things that he “knew about her.” In his whispered voice-over, accompanying the two opening shots of Vlady on a balcony of a housing complex, Godard introduces her first as the actress—“She’s Marina Vlady, she’s an actress”—and then, with the second shot, as the character—“She’s Juliette Janson, she lives here.” With this pseudo-Brechtian device he is saying, in effect, that Juliette Janson and Marina Vlady are the same person seen from different angles.

Godard delivers the longest and most agonizingly confessional part of his monologue as the sound track to a microcosmic view into the depths of a
cup of espresso. It concerns his failed relationship with Vlady. Both self-excoriating and self-pitying, Godard edges into the painful rejection from a philosophical angle.

Since each event transforms my daily life, since I endlessly fail to communicate; I mean, to understand, to love, to make myself be loved. And since each failure makes me endure a solitude, since… since… since I can neither tear myself away from the objectivity that crushes me nor from the subjectivity that exiles me, since it is neither possible for me to raise myself to being nor to fall into nothingness, I must listen.

In another commentary, which accompanies a scene of Juliette driving to meet her husband at the garage where he works, Godard shifts the blame for his romantic failure. Over a pair of close-ups of the actress, he whispers: “Objects exist and if one accords to them a more careful attention than to people, it is because they exist more than these people do. Dead objects are always alive. Living people are often already dead.”

Godard did not refer to his “characters” but to “people”: it was not Juliette but Vlady whom he saw as already essentially dead—her rejection of him being proof, for him, of her inner inertness. But he nonetheless admitted the delights that she provided him in memory, as he watched images of her in the editing room (“… to have caught in passing a reason to live, and to have held it for a few seconds”). As in
Made in USA
, his shots of a woman were romantic souvenirs viewed across the abyss of his loss.