Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (90 page)

As he had done in his preliminary audio script, Godard films musical phrases as if they were literary phrases: he takes the music at its word, and he was explicitly aware of this effect: “Here, it’s Beethoven, he’s telling me something… Everything depends on the story that he’s telling me, finally.”
⁸¹
The blend of high and low cultural elements, classical music and the gangster story, renews the tale of Carmen as did none of the other versions made at the same time.

Befitting a film in which music played such a decisive part, Godard edited with a newfound attention to sound. Though he had always made distinctive
use of the sound track, he had started, since his return with
Sauve qui peut
, to do his own sound editing using only two tracks. As he knew, twelve tracks were the industry standard at the time, and some Hollywood directors even used sixty. But where such elaborate sound mixes were used to create artificially natural ambiance, Godard used his two tracks to achieve what he described as “sculpting with sound.”
⁸²
In
First Name: Carmen
, Godard’s quick sonic cutting and intricate interweaving of dialogue, sound effects, and music created an extraordinarily complex sound world that is itself musical.

The film’s qualities were recognized at once.
First Name: Carmen
premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1983 and was awarded the Golden Lion, the festival’s top prize, as well as “a special prize for the technical value of the image and the sound.”

First Name: Carmen
opened on January 11, 1984, in Paris, shown together with a short film that was screened as a prelude,
How Can I Love (A Man When I Know He Don’t Want Me)
—Anne-Marie Miéville’s entry into filmmaking. Miéville, who was also credited with the adaptation and screenplay of
First Name: Carmen
, took the title of her film from a line in Preminger’s
Carmen Jones
. Unlike Godard’s work,
How Can I Love
is simple and naturalistic in form. The film is a series of brief sketches in which a woman faces four men who successively pose a drily comic array of obstacles to their relationship. A fifth man, her daughter’s teenage friend, propositions the woman, but she rejects him. Miéville audaciously placed her scenes in blunt succession without any transitional devices, thereby gracefully invoking a greater sweep of life than the film’s modest scope suggested.

Godard had originally planned to release
First Name: Carmen
by personally presenting it in provincial theaters, in order to break the hold that Parisian audiences and critics had on a film’s destiny. These plans fell through, but Godard need not have worried: the critical reception was exultant. In
Le Monde
, Louis Marcorelles declared, “The cinema has never been so futile nor so noble.”
⁸³
In
Libération
, Serge Daney wrote that “after the film’s first press screening in Venice, everyone (including Godardians) came out like sleepwalkers who had been given a series of uppercuts in their sleep.”
⁸⁴
The film was both a popular and a commercial success.
⁸⁵

However, the paradox of the canonization of the New Wave in general and of Godard in particular during the first years of Mitterrand’s presidency is that—despite such apparently good results as those of
First Name: Carmen
—this artistically progressive strain of cinema was out of step with the mood in France. The men and women of 1968 who had come to power were the artistic children of the New Wave, but they were also the children of rock music, television, comic books, and other popular forms of a commercial culture that they accepted with equanimity, even enthusiasm. Indeed, Jack
Lang also sought to canonize other mass-media creations, hiring an adviser from the pop music world who was widely known as the “minister of rock.”

Godard’s work was becoming ever more intellectual at a time when French society, high and low, was increasingly turning toward a quasi-universal American vernacular mass culture. Lang may have turned his back on the Deauville festival and inveighed against the pervasiveness of American pop culture, but he would have come off as reactionary had he rejected local adaptations of that culture by members of generations, including his own, who were raised on it. If he was using his office to reinforce, financially and pedagogically, the artistic heritage of the New Wave, it was largely because the phenomenon, left to the marketplace, would not have survived on its own. As a living symbol of France’s highest tradition, Godard was invulnerable; as a player in the industry, his place was shakier than ever.

Godard’s response to the changing trends was to express his displeasure with them in diatribes that grew increasingly heated; he also became openly, publicly nostalgic for the era before television, before mass media. In an interview in the first week of 1984, he sharply criticized the French media—“It’s true that, today, I can’t find information, my information, in the newspapers”—and cited this failure as the reason for his switch to classical subject matters: “That is to say, one can’t find material [for a film] in the local news. So one has to copy, and since one has to copy, I prefer to copy Antigone than the life of Raymond Barre,” a French politician.
⁸⁶
Contemporary life, Godard suggested, had become so impoverished that it no longer inspired his films; belonging to the age of living myths, he needed to resuscitate the great artistic legends as a way of telling his own story. His next project, which he announced while presenting
First Name: Carmen
at the Venice festival, promised to do so with an even more grandiose and radical flourish:

What interested us [in adapting
Carmen
]was to show what a man and a woman said to each other… What did they say when they were in the kitchen? What did they say when they were in the car? We don’t know what they said. In my next film, by chance, I keep the male character Joseph: his Carmen will be called Mary. Well then, what did Joseph and Mary say to each other before they had the baby?
⁸⁷

A woman named Mary, played by Myriem Roussel
(New Yorker Films / Photofest)

twenty-one.

HAIL MARY

“The extraordinary in an ordinary way”

A
FTER MEETING MYRIEM ROUSSEL DURING THE SHOOT
of
Passion
, Godard returned to the long-planned project called
Fathers and Daughters
. At first, he announced that it would take the form of an adaptation of
King Lear;
¹
he also considered calling it
The Man of My Life
. He stated explicitly that
Fathers and Daughters
would be “about incest,”
²
and to prepare for it, he started to read Freud’s accounts of his early psychoanalyses. He then decided to make a film about Freud and Dora (Freud’s first patient) in which the analyst’s countertransference would converge with the father’s taboo desire. Roussel was hesitant to appear in such a film. As Godard later admitted: “The actress with whom I was also hoping to have mixed relations, personal and work, naturally became afraid.”
³
He looked for a way of approaching the subject that might allay Roussel’s fears of uneasy personal implications:

I came upon a book by [psychoanalyst] Françoise Dolto called
The Gospel at Risk of Psychoanalysis
and in her introduction—I didn’t really read the rest of the book—she spoke of Mary and Joseph in a way that I never heard before. It seemed very cinematic: the story of a couple. And I’m very traditional. I’ve always made love stories and stories of couples. So that’s how I got to the story of “God and his Daughter.”
⁴

Godard explained further:

Since I have no daughter, I’ve wanted to have a daughter. I thought for a while that I would make a film about Freud and his first patient: on the problem of
the father. Then, I looked at it with regard to God the Father. And I came upon the story of Mary.
⁵

Godard was to play the role of God the Father; he would remain both invisible and ubiquitous, but his universal presence would be especially felt in one particular place: Mary’s body. Godard imposed on Mary—on Roussel—his “shadow,” his “spirit,” and his “power,” and in his absence from the screen he in fact dominated the film more forcefully than he had in
First Name: Carmen
with his living, breathing presence.

He was no less intrigued by the part played by Joseph in this drama:

We have few documents on the life of Joseph and Mary. A few sentences, that’s all, but they convey an extremely powerful situation. Joseph’s place in it is, however, a little forgotten. What happened? How did he take Mary’s secret? How did he cope with this violence? I wanted to present the two of them as an ordinary couple, an archetype of a couple, who accept the extraordinary in an ordinary way.
⁶

By approaching the story of Mary in terms of her relations with Joseph and with God—with the one she does not take physically, and with the other who takes her, spiritually—Godard had found his project of fathers and daughters, with all its sexual implications.
⁷

Originally, Godard intended to cast in the role of Joseph an actor who was close to his own age and mythical resonance: the grizzled and elegant Jean Marais, who was born in 1913, the star of Jean Cocteau’s
Beauty and the Beast
and
Orpheus
, and Cocteau’s lover, friend, privileged interpreter, and literary executor. Marais was surprised at being considered for the role of Joseph, since, as he said, “there was no reason for Joseph to be an old man with a white beard!”
⁸
But Godard too came to the same conclusion: on three different occasions, he made appointments to meet Marais; all three times, Godard canceled on the pretext of illness. The two men never met.

Then Godard offered the role to the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who was then thirty-five years old and the most prominent young thinker in France; Lévy was known especially for
Barbarism with a Human Face
, which in the wake of the 1974 publication of Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago
repudiated communism and helped launch the movement of the
nouveaux philosophes
, a group of young French intellectuals who had come to recognize (and sought to theorize) the abuses and cruelty of the Soviet and Chinese systems. Godard told Lévy the idea for the film and gave him a copy of the brief outline. Lévy finally refused the part. “I was afraid,” Lévy said. “Afraid he was going to hijack my image… I was very afraid. Not only of his extraordinary intelligence but
also of his perversity. Was I up to avoiding the trap he would eventually set for me?”
⁹

Instead, Godard cast as Joseph a young and inexperienced actor whom Myriem Roussel knew from Paris, Thierry Rode, who, like her, had few ingrained professional habits and was not established enough to contest Godard’s unusual methods. Rode is physically imposing yet inexpressive, stocky yet impassive, stolid, with a sort of frustrated forcefulness, and thus all the more moving as an ordinary man with ordinary desires who is forced to make an extraordinary sacrifice and to learn extraordinary love.

T
HE EXPERIENCE OF
First Name: Carmen
had inspired Roussel to become a professional actress. She auditioned for an acting class in Paris and was accepted. In advance of the film, now called
Je vous salue, Marie
(
Hail Mary
), Godard had a different kind of preparation in mind: he had Roussel keep video equipment in her Paris apartment, and he shot copious footage of her there—particularly when she was doing nothing in particular, simply living daily life. He also asked her to videotape herself in his absence. Meanwhile, he had her read the Bible and Françoise Dolto’s book about it. He also had her watch many films, including Carl Theodor Dreyer’s
The Passion of Joan of Arc
, Martin Scorsese’s
The King of Comedy
and
New York, New York
, Eric Rohmer’s
Pauline at the Beach
, as well as several of his own.

Committed to developing the film on the basis of their personal relations, Godard wrote to Roussel constantly—between three and five letters each day, as she recalled—and, she added, “When we didn’t see each other, we were always on the telephone.” He also gave her collage-like dossiers of images and text, all of which left her feeling both “flooded with information and affection” and nurtured “like a baby.”
¹⁰
Roussel accompanied Godard to New York in October 1983 when he presented
Passion
at the New York Film Festival; speaking to a journalist there, he said, “Myriem is my beautiful link to the outside world.”
¹¹
Yet the blend of personal and professional relations proved to be trouble.