In this occasional series, every once in a while we will view and re-view the films of Jean-Luc Godard, who died in September 2022.
HAIL MARY (1985) (B-minus) - Jean Luc Godard's take on the Catholic virgin origin story starts out flat and never really fills the screen in a compelling way. It was also confusing to watch it on DVD, because it started out with a half hour film by Godard's companion, photographer Anne-Marie Mieville, "The Book of Mary," about a precocious child acting out while her parents' marriage corrodes.
That first film is a fascinating study of an 11-year-old (Rebecca Hampton) who seeks sanctuary in books and music while sometimes navigating the evolving relationships with her parents (including Aurore Clement ("The New Girlfriend") as the mom. "Hail Mary," at 72 minutes, pales by comparison. This Mary -- a different one or the same as the girl in the short? -- works at her father's gas station (that sort of plot was considered blasphemous in itself three decades ago) and becomes pregnant even though she has never had sex with her boyfriend, Joseph.
Mary (Myriem Roussel) plays volleyball in college and often is vexed by her dilemma of biblical proportions. she claims to be perplexed by Joseph's grumpiness and frustration -- at not only how she got pregnant but by his inability to touch his own girlfriend. Godard distracts us with seemingly unrelated B-plots (one includes a young Juliette Binoche; another includes a woman named Eva (Eve?) who is sleeping with her married professor).
But he continually circles back around to the endless loop of Mary and Joseph. In the second half, the curiosity about the young actress overcomes Godard, and she starts unleashing regular full-frontal nudity. It happens often enough that it feels exploitive of Roussel (in her early 20s at the time), who doesn't really show much flair for performing on screen.
Godard flings around some philosophical musings. He cuts away to a lot of shots of the sunset, the moon, flowers and flowing water. He wraps things up with a flash forward, but by then, nothing can rescue this from mediocrity.
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (1998) (B-minus) - Do you wonder what angst the boomer artistic class was going through at the end of the millennium? Here comes Jean Luc Godard to empty his brain onto the screen for four and a half hours. Good luck sifting through it.
As you might expect, this attempt to chronicle the early days of cinema -- including the heyday of the French New Wave of the 1950s and '60s -- isn't really so much about movies as it is about the traumatized psyche of a postwar auteur. Godard wallows in images of the Holocaust for most of the run time here, which is divided into a 90-minute two-part introductory segment and then six more half-hour pieces.
As Godard liked to do, especially late in his career, he assaults the viewer with words -- both written on the screen and spoken. Add in subtitles, and it often is too much to comprehend. There were times when words flashed on the screen and subtitles tried to keep up with two or three voices. Words sometimes go untranslated. I gave up trying to follow all of it, or most of it -- especially when he starts to lapse into Latin.
Godard wallows in "an industry of masks," and his common themes are sex (or beauty) and death. He pays homage to early films (he argues that Elizabeth Taylor's career would not have taken off without the scut work of 16mm pioneers). He dedicates each segment to various people, many I've never heard of; Section 1B is devoted to John Cassavettes. By section 3A, Godard asks "What is cinema?" (Nothing.) "What does it want?" (Everything.)
The images flicker and flash. Colors bleed and figures fade in and out. Halfway through it is apparent that Godard is as enamored of art and photography as he is in cinema. Even deep into the run, we get transported back through Nazi symbolism and death-camp horrors. Section 3A ends with a collage of war atrocities alternating with shots of pretty women. In 3B we get a glimpse of Jerry Lewis in clown makeup from Lewis' infamously unreleased Holocaust movie. It takes that deep into the run to finally start acknowledging the New Wave that Godard was central to. By the final segments, Alfred Hitchcock is raised up as a deity -- we are told that the master of suspense succeeded where despots failed. Clips from American Westerns also hint at the French auteurs' key influences.
In the final reel, Godard heaps a final few scoops of scorn on the "peddlers" of the multiplexes. He laments at the "inexorable decline" of western civilization. We are doomed to corruption and chaos. Our leaders are fools and totalitarians. Cinema is an escape. "It is the end of the world," he intones. "But the sun (son?) returns."
BONUS TRACKS
Previous takes on Godard's oeuvre:
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