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March 17, 2006

In Praise of Love

All Out Of Love

By Andrew

In the first half, cast in stark black and white, in Paris, Edgar seeks after a girl who once made striking comments about the State's inability to love. Edgar seeks after her, or at least the memory of her, and finds her as a clerk in a bookstore and as a janitor in a passenger train. They share conversations along rivers, under bridges, over the phone — and all the while, she refuses to be part of his "project" — which is a novel, or a film, or an opera, or maybe a cantata to Simon Weil — or maybe not, it is never settled.

In the second half of the picture, in strong and calming colors, along the coast of France, we learn Edgar's past with this girl, Elle. She is the granddaughter of two former resistance fighters, whom Edgar is interviewing for a study of Catholicism and the WWII resistance. She remains elusive for Edgar — and for us. She's beautiful — though she insists to Edgar she is not — and she has wide eyes. And she is intellectually hostile to the Americans who come to settle contracts when Berthe's grandparents sell their memories to a Hollywood firm — Spielberg Associates. Her response is to quote to her grandmother from Robert Bresson.

In Praise of Love [2001], as a film, is hostile to settlement — it clouds my own memory. These are only a few of my memories of Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love, because it is an impossible film to memorize. And that is, as I see it, one of Godard's points. Our memories, as complex as they are, and what becomes known to us as History, are intergenerational, and are essential questions that need to remain open. Godard asks these questions — of himself most of all. He doesn't settle them, they remain open as they should be — whereas the State or Hollywood intervene to answer them for him, and for all of us, often forcibly.

Unfortunately, many critics can't bring themselves to think outside the frame, and rush to answer Godard's questions for him. It says something about American critics that the memories they would take from In Praise of Love would be reduced to perceived affronts to their American selves. As Roger Ebert grumbled, "If you agree with Noam Chomsky, you will have the feeling that you would agree with this film if only you could understand it. Godard's anti-Americanism is familiar by now, but has spun off into flywheel territory." Ebert is all too American in his response — he longs for the straightforwardness of Godard's previous works, like Breathless or Weekend, but in his nostalgia he fails to even pay attention to the film in question: in his review, he mistakes the French resisters for Holocaust survivors (among other glaring oversights).

Contrary to Ebert's taking offense, In Praise of Love is not an outright "attack" — its too subtle for that. That the irony is lost on Ebert in the midst of all his trashing makes it clear enough. In Praise of Love is a challenge to what cinema can hope to achieve. For some, it is a challenge to their patience — a few folks I've watched it with have fallen fast asleep, and the subtitled French makes the film feel even more distant. What I could gather, however, makes me double back over the movies I love, demanding of me, "Why do you love them?" The protagonist Edgar is a placid agony over his "project" throughout the picture — Godard's trademark title cards are threaded throughout, among them "Love," "Something," "A Long Time Ago." What I love — does it settle easy scores for me, or does it rip open my doubts and make me face myself? I hope that I have the courage to recognize the former, and wherewithal to survive the latter. Like Godard, I lust for an essential — and ever elusive — integrity. And like Godard, sometimes I can get a little unintelligble.

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