Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (84 page)

Godard often spoke very sharply to Nathalie Baye, who was sometimes reduced to tears. Relations with his two cameramen, particularly with Lubtchansky, were also troubled. Godard had expected Lubtchansky and Berta to talk together during the shoot, so that he could make images on the basis of their discussions. The two cameramen, however, quickly realized that they had different styles of lighting (Lubtchansky preferred high contrast; Berta tended toward softer illumination); since neither planned to adopt the other’s style, they took turns deferring to each other and becoming, in effect, the other’s assistant, depending on the scene—and, as Lubtchansky said, “depending on who didn’t want to talk with Jean-Luc.”

Lubtchansky often found himself in that position, he said, and their tensions rose to fury during the shoot of a scene that took place in a television studio:

It was a close-up on [Baye], and she was wearing an earphone. [Godard] was asking her questions. It wasn’t written. We were filming her with short magazines of 35mm film which lasted four minutes. While we were doing the shot, I noticed that the film had run out. I was above, Godard was below, under the table. I wondered, what to do? I let it go; then after a minute without film, I leaned over and said to him under the table, “Jean-Luc, there’s no film.” He comes out, insults me, “Imbecile, what kind of jerk, you don’t know that the cinema is also sound!” He kept on insulting me, and I got angry. We came close to having a fistfight.
¹⁶

The scene is not in the film. When the filming was over, Lubtchansky vowed never to work with Godard again.

A further source of stress was the sexual minefield of incestuous implications which Godard’s work of the 1970s had approached. In
Sauve qui peut
, Paul Godard was divorced, with an adolescent daughter. The child’s role was played by Cécile Tanner, the twelve-year-old daughter of Godard’s Swiss colleague Alain Tanner.

In January 1979, Godard had met Cécile by chance at Orly Airport in Paris, as they both were about to board a flight to Geneva. (She was traveling alone and, to spare her from having to wear a pinney and to sit near the flight attendants, he volunteered to sit with her.) Godard asked her what she liked to do, and Cécile said that she liked to play soccer. A few weeks later, he sent Cécile a present: a new soccer ball. Shortly thereafter he called to ask her whether she would appear in a film about soccer that he planned to make. She agreed, but he made no such film. Instead, later in the year, he asked her to play a role in
Sauve qui peut
, for which she would play soccer. She again agreed. To prepare her for the role, he sent her to practice in Geneva with a girls’ team.

Cécile’s first appearance in
Sauve qui peut
is on a school soccer field, where Paul has come to meet her. Godard filmed her in close-up as she prepared an inbound throw. In the editing room, he slowed the close-up down with his stop-action “decomposition,” while, on the sound track, Paul talked with the soccer coach, a man:

P
AUL
: Do you have a daughter?
C
OACH
: Yes.
P
AUL
: How old?
C
OACH
: Same as Cécile.
P
AUL
: Does she have breasts?
C
OACH
: Same as Cécile.
P
AUL
: Have you ever wanted to fuck her in the ass? Coach: No.

During the shoot, Cécile had no idea what the men had discussed. Then she saw the film. “When I saw it, at the private screening for the crew, I crawled under my seat, I was dying of shame,” Tanner recalled.
¹⁷
She had been unaware that her face would be studied in slow motion; but most of all, she was shocked to find herself portrayed as an object of incestuous pedophilic lust. Although it is of course the character Paul Godard’s self-abasing confession that is presented on-screen, the object of the character’s illicit curiosity was publicly displayed under her own name—and Cécile felt humiliated.

This would not be the film’s only scene of sexual debasement. After Paul Godard encounters Isabelle the prostitute, played by Huppert—she approaches him as he waits on line at a movie theater showing Chaplin’s
City Lights
¹⁸
—the film veers into a section called “Work,” regarding the prostitute’s experiences. These experiences are harrowing: in a hotel room, a paunchy older man tells her to strip from the waist down so that he can stare at her while he talks business on the phone, then he orders her to pretend to be his daughter. Later she shows up for a call at an office; a harsh, adamantine executive orders her, another prostitute, and a young male employee to create a sexual “assembly line.” The pair of scenes represents the two polar extremes of the sex industry—a false identification of role-playing and a dehumanizing mechanization—which resemble the two poles of performance and subjection which actors endure in the cinema.

While visiting Huppert in Wyoming during the shoot of
Heaven’s Gate
, Godard had explained her role in a sentence: “I want it to be the face of suffering.” But, though he intended the character of Isabelle to suffer, Godard did not permit the actress to express it: Huppert recalled that he wanted his
actors to be “neutral”: “He had us speak like oracles… He doesn’t want an interpretation, he wants the affirmation of a thought.” She considered that, though he sought “to remove all psychology,” he revealed the character all the more. The result, she sensed, rightly, was that he made a film “on” or “about” her, personally, as an actress: “He showed my fragility and my dependence, as a beginning actress, with respect to the world of men, of power, of money,” and also what she called her “indifference to [her] own body.”
¹⁹
She spoke of Godard’s control of her diction and of her gestures, of his sense that “one must imprison the actor so that his true soul can emerge.” She felt that Godard’s methods brought her closer to herself and, paradoxically, to the character she was embodying, and she found the experience artistically gratifying.

T
HE FILM BEGINS
with a flourish—shots of wispy cirrus clouds in a bright blue sky, accompanied by electronic new-age music by Gabriel Yared. These shots announce what is to come: some of the most serene, exalted images of nature yet put on film. These are also images of Switzerland, which Godard considered his “studio of exteriors,” with “forests, lakes, snow, mountains, and wind.”
²⁰

The presence of nature in the film is associated with Paul Godard’s withdrawing lover, Denise, played by Nathalie Baye. As Denise pedals her three-speed bicycle along a tree-lined road bordering Lake Geneva, a traveling shot shows the lake, the grassy banks, and the mountains, suffused with golden sunlight. Later, alone in her apartment, Denise reads aloud from her notebook. The text forms part of what she calls her “project,” which is not a novel but “may be part of one.” The passage is drawn verbatim from Robert Linhart’s 1978 book about his years as a factory worker,
L’Etabli:
²¹

The temptation of death. But life rebels and resists. The organism resists. The muscles resist. The nerves resist. There is something in the body and the head that buttresses itself against the repetition and the nothingness. Life: a more rapid gesture, an arm that falls back out of rhythm, a slower step, a gust of irregularity, a false movement… Everything that, in each of the men of the assembly line, silently shouts: “I am not a machine!”

Godard’s new editing methods—the “decomposition” of motion into successive freeze-frames—were a visual equivalent of Linhart’s attempt to recover and to analyze the human element of work. In
Sauve qui peut
, Godard “decomposed” such motions as Denise’s solitary bicycling, the beating of a woman at a train station, and Paul tackling Denise in a passionate embrace; he studied these intimate moments as if they too were work.

Paul and Denise’s problems are centered on work, or rather, on their inability to work together. Like Godard in recent times, Paul is in a state of flux. Paul Godard is making nothing, doing nothing, suffering from an uncreative confusion. Denise is in flux too, but working toward a positive change: she is a producer at a television station but is leaving it to join the staff of a rural village newspaper that a former urban revolutionary friend of hers inherited from his father. Denise is leaving the city to return to nature, and to seek the calm that she needs for her “project.”

The conflict that separates them in their quest—Godard’s quest, shared with Anne-Marie Miéville, to unify life and work—is expressed with an unusual clarity in a scene in which the two, seated at the bar of a café, try to talk out their practical difficulties:

P
AUL
: Have you really put in an ad for the apartment?… That’s really nasty. Give me a little time. I’m getting sick of living in this big city too.
D
ENISE
: I don’t believe you anymore. And I’m beginning to get fed up even in a small city like Nyon. It would have helped me if you’d moved in. But you said you needed quiet for your new projects.
P
AUL
: I still have these projects.
D
ENISE
: No. They depend on me staying put. You want a guardian angel, and I’m sick of it…You always wanted love to come from work, from the things we could do together, not just at night. You wanted the nights to come from the days, not vice versa.
P
AUL
: It’s not me, it’s how people arrange things. We agreed that love isn’t possible without a little work, or else it’s just explosions, nothing that lasts.

The scene continues outside the café, where Paul tries to get Denise to follow him, and Denise yells at him, slaps and wrestles him, and leaves him behind, anguished and humiliated, in the street. Later, when he visits her, he leaps across the table to embrace her, and both crash to the floor in pain, in a shot that Godard “decomposed,” increasing the ambiguity of the blend of romance and violence. Isabelle happens to walk in on their rough scene, and Paul says, “We can’t seem to touch each other without giving each other bruises.” It is a line that Godard, in interviews, admitted to having gotten from Miéville.

At the film’s end, Paul Godard, who runs across a street to chase after his ex-wife and daughter, is struck by a car and is lying in the street, bewildered by his own oncoming death: “I can’t be dying, my life isn’t flashing before my eyes.” He closes his own eyes with his hands, like Belmondo at the end of
Breathless
, as his ex-wife leads his daughter away, saying, “It has nothing to do with us.” The music on the sound track swells with a phrase of violins,
and as they walk away, they pass an orchestra standing in a passageway, playing the music heard on the sound track.

Technically, the sequence, comprising a long pan shot from Paul in the street to the ex-wife and daughter walking through a dark tunnel, was difficult to execute—and also very expensive to shoot, due to the string orchestra in the tunnel. At the time, Godard was still somewhat agoraphobic and uneasy working in public. As Romain Goupil recalled, “He was afraid of being in the street, of stopping traffic, of the people who were watching, so he did things too fast.”
²²
As a result, Lubtchansky recalled, Godard ignored his advice and the shot was ruined; the crew returned to film it again a week later—without the director.

The self-pitying ending, of a man being hit by a car as he turns to follow a woman, is taken from Truffaut’s 1977 film,
The Man Who Loved Women
. With this ending,
Sauve qui peut
presents the specter of a world without Godard as a filmmaker: only the existence of the film itself brings the world back from the edge of that precipice. Godard depicts the mythic self-sacrifice of the artist so that his art—and his myth—may live on.

G
ODARD HAD DESCRIBED
his situation lucidly, months earlier, at the Cinémathèque Suisse, when he spoke of wanting to return to his “homeland in the cinema.”
²³
Where Paul Godard failed, Jean-Luc Godard succeeded. The sentiment is evident in
Sauve qui peut:
despite the film’s casual depictions of despair and brutality, the overall mood, strangely, is that of a newfound equilibrium. It was a sentiment that Godard retrospectively confirmed.
²⁴
The equilibrium is that of Godard who, despite all conflicts on the set and in life, despite his years of doubt, frustration, and wandering, was now, again, where he belonged. In the credits, he noted that the film was “composed by Jean-Luc Godard.” It was a role that suggested a calmer, more serene, and more classically artistic method.

Godard attributed his new compositional precision and his attention to nature to his preliminary work on
Histoire(s) du cinema
. He explained to a German interviewer that, while composing his shots for
Sauve qui peut
, he “was constantly seeking a grammar which used to be manifestly present and which has since been lost, such as is seen for example in the films of Griffith.”
²⁵

The film’s equilibrium is also a reflection of the times, in which the great ideological wars of western Europe seemed now to be a thing of the past and personal matters and conflicts were moderated in serene and modern infrastructure nations. (In this regard, the film was as predictive of coming changes—the social-democratic consensus that derived from the election of François Mitterrand in May 1981—as
La Chinoise
had been of the political and cultural crises of 1968.)