Even though In Praise of Love, the prosaically-translated (Eloge de L’Amour) Jean-Luc Godard feature from 2001, is the most narratively straightforward of his most recent films, there is no reason to be overcome by its vaunted simplicity.
For one thing, that would mean perpetuating the fiction that Godard has been producing a series of indecipherable Rubik’s Cubes over the last so many years, the exact number of years depending on your particular critical prejudice. Some of his movies are occasionally puzzling now and again, but there’s nothing especially confounding about the narrative lines of Nouvelle Vague (1990) or Hélas Pour Moi (1993). JLG/JLG (1994) is just what its title implies, Godard musing directly to the audience (and self-deprecatingly, at that). American critics can’t offer substantive opinions on the bulk of his films from the late 1990s, since only For Ever Mozart (1996) was released theatrically in the U.S. True, that wasn’t a purely narrative film, but since its last portion was taken up with frankly stated opinions on the destruction of the former Yugoslavia, it can hardly be called obscure. Yet none of this has kept a vast majority of those who bothered writing about Godard at all from accusing him of deliberate obscurity. It is most of these critics who have greeted In Praise of Love’s plain narrative line with relief though it’s amusing to note how many have managed to misreport this "simple" narrative anyway.
At any rate, concentrating on In Praise of Love’s narrative only distracts use from the film’s sublime beauty. Shot in two phases, one a beautifully-detailed black-and-white, and set in the film’s "present," and the other in video that ranges from highly saturated and searing to more toned-down and natural color and taking place "two years earlier," the movie is, like the title says, an ode to love. But its concept of love is far from the simple romantic display common in cinema – or painting or theater or music. To champion his concept of love, he has to confront history, a nebulous force that, paradoxically, has to be grasped materially. For Godard, cinema is uniquely crafted to reach out and make that seizure, and in the first, black-and-white portion of In Praise of Love, he attempts to show how, and how not, it can.
The first phase lasts about an hour and is dominated by the perspective of a would-be artist in his 30s named Edgar. Edgar, played by Bruno Putzulu, is determined to make a film, write a novel, stage a cantata or do something about the four stages of love (meeting, physical passion, break-up, reconciliation) as it applies to three couples in of different ages (young, middle-aged, old). Edgar considers the stages and the ages to be crucial moments in life, historical moments, in fact, and tells an actor at one audition that history will be moving through her, that her character will, in effect, be a vessel, a container. In effect, something empty which is filled by stages and ages. Later, Edgar says, he will inevitably be filming "the down and out" ("les miserables"), refers to Victor Hugo, and averts that, at least in part, his film will be a sociological document.
As Edgar scurries around Paris preparing his – well, whatever he’s preparing - she writes down ideas in a notebook which remains empty every time we get a look at its pages. Clearly, Godard is making fun of Edgar; just as clearly, Edgar is, if not Godard himself, than a person Godard used to be, or a figure who reminds Godard of himself at a younger age. One aspect of In Praise of Love that no one has missed is that its views of Paris at night look very Godardian circa 1965. Edgar is traversing that old Godardian Paris both physically and artistically, gazing at characters who reduced to ectoplasm, who were less than the forces of history, in a gorgeous-looking place where love was merely an abstract notion.
If Edgar would just look around, he’d see at least two lives that contradict his precious theories. His financier, M. Rosenthal (Claude Baignères) compulsively collects of paintings, attempting to reassemble a collection that was partly owned by his father. At first, you might think Nazi looting might be involved – Rosenthal calls a museum "thieves" at one point) – and maybe it is (though he’s after a Lichtenstein, too) but in one brief, overheard scene he speaks of his love for his father’s partner’s daughter, a girl who threw him over. Is he trying to reassemble the collection out of sublimated physical passion, despite the break-up? What happened to reconciliation?
This is counterpoint to a larger relationship Edgar has with a slightly younger woman he’s known before - we never hear her name - whom a friend tracks down working as a cleaning woman in a train yard. Before that, the young woman (Cécile Camp) had lost a TV acting job for refusing to speak her lines, and she doesn’t want to speak with Edgar on his project when he catches up with her. But his persistence wins her over as a companion, though not a lover.
Here is where we have to be careful not to let our synapses get clogged up with narrative. Particularly during and after Edgar and the girl’s reunion, what’s important is to watch what Godard is doing with the images that Edgar and the girl help to formulate, either as observers, or as parts of the composition.
Godard has always alluded to his debt to painting, most explicitly with 1981’s Passion. Here he makes it plainer, as if for the hard-of-seeing. In a series of important scenes, he takes his camera down to the banks of the Seine, almost to an industrialized quarter, as the Impressionists did, though it’s a de-industrialized depressed section, Auteuil. Edgar and the girl stand under a bridge or loll in the grass and talk, philosophically or romantically. In the background or foreground, a man sculls down the curving river; workers walk by with shovels over their shoulders or push a wheelbarrow down a riverside path.
Naturally, all these natural and man-made (and man-abandoned) figures are luxuriously composed; Godard’s eye is unchallenged even now. But more importantly, he draws our eye into the composition and on to cinema’s power to animate. Right away we see the movement of the scull down the river or the tramping of the workers as they move by. Then there’s the ebbing of waves, of bouncing barrow wheels, little secondary motions. Finally, there’s the slow but unmistakable changing sunlight, the dappling on the water, the reflection of factory glass.
What is this little bit of light, lying underneath the boater’s oars, the workers’ footsteps, the stubborn isolation of – what shall we call the young woman, She? Her? – and the self-justifications of pompous Edgar? It’s the passage of time, surely, and time, and time and again, melding together into history.
Only Godard has the talent, and, at 70 (at the time) the control to have created this hour of the sublime merely as a prologue for the half hour that follows. Unfortunately, in one of those bitter paradoxes that just seem to roll off his back, the movie’s final third, the phase shot in video, has been taken as a jeremiad against American culture in general and Steven Spielberg in particular. It’s true that Godard despises Spielberg’s films, above all Schindler’s List, but he’s also the same filmmaker and critic who championed American filmmaker and is largely responsible for the international (and American) recognition of Samuel Fuller. This is not a man who hates American cinema.
To check your reflexes to what’s said in this portion – or any portion – of In Praise of Love, it’s wise to again revisit the younger Godard, this time 1966’s Masculin-Féminin. Above all, that movie warned, beware the disjunction between what a soundtrack says and an image shows. And that’s exactly what happens in In Praise of Love. Godard’s camera never gets close enough to anyone to assume he’s endorsing anything anyone is saying; if he wants you to know he believes something, he’s just as likely to walk on screen and speak to the camera as let a character speak for him. Moreover, after the character – it’s the young woman – finishes her long-winded jeremiad against American culture and filmmaking, in the next scene, she off-handedly confesses she probably shouldn’t have said anything since she doesn’t really know that much about American films.
As much as anything else, characters more sincerely tell us, this final half hour is about the sea and the rain, about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, about love and beauty. During it, Godard uses a video camera, a desk lamp, and saturated colors to portray a face of a woman in a way that could make Rembrandt jealous. You might say that Rembrandt painted from life – his models were "real" – and that Godard invents his figures – they’re "fictional."
But by this point in the film, Godard has finally been able to grab hold of history, through the characters of the girls’ grandparents, (Jean Davy, Françoise Verny), former Resistance fighters selling their wartime stories to Spielberg. Through that history, which is not heroic in the accepted sense, nor beautiful in the common sense, Godard reaches out for just one quick glimpse of love in its entirety. That’s all he gets, but we share in a sense of how all-encompassing – how terrifying – it is.
In Praise of Love refuses to tell you how to feel about love, beauty, art, or any of the grand subjects it confronts, and that sometimes leaves viewers feeling a little high and dry. It’s not cold, though. On the contrary, the movie is profoundly tragic. In his old age, Godard sees very little love in the world (he has another bit about the former Yugoslavia in here; clearly the country’s break-up was a signal event for him). No doubt that’s why he went to so much trouble to make a beautiful film, so simple to understand, that goes to so much trouble to praise it.