Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (96 page)

The voice-over commentator makes clear the implicit metaphorical point: “Death is the path toward the light.” Thus the views into the lightbulbs that were filmed in the musicians’ studio and the shots through the swinging doors at the beach apartment in Trouville toward the sky and directly into the sun take on their full meaning. Indeed, as Champetier reported, in scenes where no source of light was available, Godard gave characters hand mirrors to reflect it into the frame: as she described it, “We had to find something to pierce the shot, to pierce it with light.”
⁴²
When Godard filmed directly into an incandescent light that illuminates the faces of Catherine Ringer and Fred Chichin, or into the sun illuminating Villeret, or into the overhead fluorescent lights in the airport illuminating the Prince, he was filming the view toward death.

Soigne ta droite
concludes with a screening of the Prince’s film. However, it is not something that can be viewed in a theater; rather, the airplane pilot and his wife take up places alongside the river Seine and gaze upon Paris. The Prince’s final work is the whole of reality, as it appears to them after returning to earth after their brush with death in the airplane. The grand cinematic embrace of all existence demands the ultimate sacrifice of its creator. The “solitary man on the stage of the world,” the artist, working alone, works at the cost of his life. The self-martyrdom to art that the Prince endures is the same one that Godard, behind the camera, suggests he endures as the burden of his solitary work.

Soigne ta droite
features a love story, that of Ringer and Chichin. They offer the example of how love and work together can bring about a kind of art that keeps its back toward death and faces life. From this perspective,
Soigne ta droite
is an open letter to Miéville, whose collaboration with Godard was the slender thread holding him on earth. As Hervé Duhamel later recalled, Godard
and Miéville now had separate apartments in Rolle, directly across the hall from each other, yet they continued to live in close proximity and complicity, indeed intimacy: Duhamel often stayed in Godard’s apartment, and he noticed that whatever went on in one apartment was audible in the other.
⁴³
At the same time, Miéville was preparing to make her own first feature film,
Mon Cher Sujet
(My Dear Subject),
⁴⁴
which the new commercial television channel La Cinq agreed, in the spring of 1986, to cofinance. She was setting out on her own lonely and perilous path, and putting at risk her own place on Earth.
Soigne ta droite
, in its cautionary hints to the woman with whom he was sharing work and life, as well as its self-pitying intimations regarding his own solitude, recalls the strategies of Godard’s works from the 1960s. His public allusion to artistic and personal distance from Miéville is one of the most poignant and painful aspects of the film.

T
HE FIRST SKETCH
scenes of
Soigne ta droite
were shot in May and June 1986, in Paris and Trouville. Then, in July and August, Godard added the airport and airplane sequences, which he realized under remarkable conditions: he insisted that the airplane scenes actually be filmed in flight. Each morning, the cast and crew met at Orly Airport in Paris and flew to the airport at Nantes (a brief trip, taking less than an hour), which is the airport seen in the film. But then, as Duhamel later recalled, “Afterwards, we took off again from Nantes in order to shoot in the airplane. An airplane is very noisy, so we had to fly at low speeds around Nantes. We would film one shot, then land.”
⁴⁵
At a cost of ten thousand francs (at the time, seventeen hundred dollars) per hour, he filmed in the air for thirty hours.

The two musicians of Les Rita Mitsouko were originally slated to participate in the sketches, but Godard could not figure out roles for them. He kept them waiting as they prepared to go to London for additional production and mixing of their album. When he met them to talk it over, as Ringer recalled, they ended up in a fistfight—“He spilled his coffee on me, and I spilled my beer on his head, and then we punched each other”—because the musicians refused to repay the money Godard had given them (“he stood us up many times and we lost lots of time waiting for him”).
⁴⁶

Godard shot some added footage in January 1987 (in the corridors of LTC, a film processing laboratory near Paris),
⁴⁷
but then had to put
Soigne ta droite
aside: he had to fulfill his outstanding commitment to Menahem Golan to have
King Lear
ready in time for the Cannes festival in May 1987 and so did not complete the film until later that year.

Soigne ta droite
was released commercially in France on December 30, 1987. It had been more than two years since the release of Godard’s previous
film,
Detective
, in May 1985. Godard promoted
Soigne ta droite
vigorously. One French journalist remarked that the publicity campaign was unprecedented in his career,
⁴⁸
another remarked that “Jean-Luc Godard is everywhere.”
⁴⁹
Godard even went so far as to allow a televised reunion with Anna Karina on a talk show. The sentimental occasion, however, soon broke down over Godard’s unsentimental response to the host’s softball question about their great youthful romance:

I
NTERVIEWER:
Can one ever be as happy afterwards? Did this great love that was given…
K
ARINA:
One can, but differently.
I
NTERVIEWER:
I see.
G
ODARD:
I think that one can be much happier…

Karina responded with a gasp of shock, and Godard continued, “And that tomorrow, and day after day…” but before he could complete his sentence, she got up and went off in tears, leaving Godard behind looking bewildered and humbled, as if he had been slapped.

If Godard’s other public appearances on behalf of
Soigne ta droite
were less dramatic, they were nonetheless rich in what Danièle Heymann of
Le Monde
called “aphorisms and maxims on the state of the world, which he adorns with digressions about tennis.”
⁵⁰
His frank revelations, his prodigality with his thoughts, and his playful yet intensely committed, quasi-oracular presence generated a sort of metacritique that amplified their usefulness as advertising for the film.

The critical response to
Soigne ta droite
was enthusiastic. Michel Boujut of
L’Evènement du jeudi
said that the film was “rather a filmed poem, a soft electroshock, a Dadaist collage where what remains on the retina is nothing but light, movement, and emotion.”
⁵¹
Michel Perez devoted his entire column in
Le Nouvel Observateur
to the study of a single image from the film, the view from the swinging doors of the Trouville apartment to the ocean.
⁵²
In its opening week,
Soigne ta droite
was number-one at the Paris box office, and it shared the prix Louis Delluc, the most prestigious French film award, with Louis Malle’s
Au Revoir les enfants
.

The warm readmittance of Godard that took place in France with the release of
Soigne ta droite
was not replicated in the United States, where the film remained unreleased until 2000. Yet in an English-language film intended primarily for the American market,
King Lear
, which Godard had already shot, he took up the principal themes outlined in
Soigne ta droite:
his burlesque yet tragic view of history; the terminal corruption of the cinema and his sufferings at the hands of the indifferent businesspeople who had
laid hold of it; and his metaphysical view toward a mythical world beyond. In
King Lear
, he evoked these themes even more explicitly, and with a boldness regarding the power of cinema that is unprecedented, in or outside the work of Godard.
King Lear
would show artistic martyrdom at an unsurpassable level.

The first image
(Cannon / Photofest)

twenty-three.

KING LEAR

“The dawn of our first image”

T
HE ADAPTATION OF
K
ING
L
EAR
WAS THE CULMINATION
of Godard’s effort to make a film about fathers and daughters, which he had been discussing publicly since 1980. In July 1982, shortly after completing
Passion
and while preparing to work with Myriem Roussel on their joint project, Godard expressed his desire to film Shakespeare’s play, but he took no practical steps to fulfill it. However, in the wake of
Hail Mary
, he felt he had found a new approach to the subject, through
The Lover
, Marguerite Duras’s 1984 novel about an adolescent girl’s affair with an older man.

Godard asked Marin Karmitz to call Duras on his behalf and tell her that he wanted to make a film of the book. Duras told Karmitz, “It’s too personal, it’s really me, the only way to detach me from it would be with lots of money.” Karmitz replied, “Very well, I’ll tell him, he won’t want to make the film anymore.”
¹
In the end, Duras sold her novel to the producer Claude Berri, and the resulting glossy costume production, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, resembled neither a film by Duras nor one by Godard.

Instead, Godard made
King Lear
, which came into being through a tortuous process resembling a comedy of errors. Every early effort on Godard’s part to advance the project was in vain, and his relationships with most of the participants sooner or later turned bitter. Yet power plays and clashes of will were singularly appropriate to
King Lear;
since Godard wove the making of the film into the film itself, the behind-the-scenes conflicts coalesced with the substance of the drama.

King Lear
gathers in one film all of Godard’s preoccupations from this period, and does so in an extremely original, albeit elusive, form. It culminated
a cycle of work that began with
Sauve qui peut
and was centered on Godard’s self-mythologizing in and through cinema and his recuperation and redefinition of the grand tradition of art by way of the cinema. As such,
King Lear
is something of a personal manifesto—and yet the conditions of its production were so troubled and so pressured, so comically disastrous, as to invite wonder that anything at all, let alone one of Godard’s greatest artistic achievements, should have resulted.

At the Cannes festival in 1985, when Godard signed with Menahem Golan to make the film, he told the producer that his idea was “to do King Lear as King Leone, as a sort of a patriarch-gangster… like a godfather.”
²
Golan approved the project, with the proviso that Godard have a screen-writer who would meet with Golan’s approval. Godard suggested Norman Mailer, and Golan approved.

Mailer was contacted on Golan and Godard’s behalf by Tom Luddy, who worked with Francis Ford Coppola and was also an independent producer whom Godard had hired to be his “go-between,” as Luddy put it, with the American participants and with Golan.
³
In New York, Luddy met with Mailer to ask whether he would write the script. Mailer was deeply reluctant.

At that time I had a great deal of respect for Godard, but I also knew that he was hell on writers, so I said, “Well, thank you Tom, but no thanks.” And he said, “What if you could also direct
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
”?… And I said, “In that case, Paris is worth a Mass.”
⁴

Golan then spoke with Mailer by telephone and told him, “Mr. Mailer, I welcome you to a two-movie contract.”

Mailer, who had directed three feature films in the 1960s that were mainly improvised, was sympathetic to Godard’s own rejection of the traditional film script. Nonetheless, he had forebodings: “My feeling was precisely, this is going to be a tough job and it probably won’t be too agreeable, and certainly what I write is not going to be of much moment in this. But it’s the only way I can get to make
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
.” In the event, Mailer’s misgivings were justified.

G
OLAN HAD AGREED
that his company, Cannon, would pay Godard one million dollars in twelve monthly installments, at the end of which period the director would deliver a negative. The napkin contract called for Godard to keep rights in Switzerland and half the gross in France, and to have final cut only for the Swiss and French releases.
⁵
The film—his first English-language feature—was supposed to be filmed in the U.S. Virgin Islands and
be ready for the 1986 Cannes festival. Soon after signing with Golan, Godard got to work. His first step was to turn to Orson Welles to be his “guide” to Shakespeare, but Welles died soon after, in October 1985. Godard worked on
Soigne ta droite
and
Grandeur et décadence
instead; as the Cannes festival of May 1986 approached, he had hardly begun
King Lear
.