Le redoutable
Michel Hazanavicius (2017)
Many people who know his work consider Jean-Luc Godard a great auteur. Many people who know him as a public personality find him prescriptive and humourless. Many fewer people would regard his artistry and his lack of personal appeal as a paradox: on the strength of the six features I’ve watched and his contributions to Emmanuel Laurent’s documentary Two in the Wave (2010), I can see that Godard has made some brilliant films and given some alienating interviews. In his dramedy biopic Redoubtable, Michel Hazanavicius describes the public and private life of Godard in the late 1960s, and shows him to be an egomaniac bore in both domains. As a biopic subject, a movie director, like a novelist, is at a disadvantage. It’s hard to convey – in the way that the life story of a performing artist or even a painter can convey – what makes him or her special. Hazanavicius’s film parodies mannerisms and moments in its subject’s early work. The narrative is divided into chapter headings that echo Godard’s penchant for title cards and on-screen slogans. None of this pastiche is any substitute for, or adequate encapsulation of, the real thing.
A scene late in Redoubtable takes place on the set of Le vent d’est (1970), a picture made by the Dziga Vertov Group, the radical film-making cooperative that Godard brought together in the light of events in France in May 1968. The scene lampoons the impracticability of the Group’s tenet of collective decision-making – in particular, the absurdity of someone as certain they’re always right as Godard is subjecting himself to paralysing creative democracy. The sequence climaxes with one of his collaborators telling him he needs to make a choice between politics and cinema. If he admires Godard – and believes and regrets that, from the end of the 1960s onwards, he continued to muddle the two things – it’s puzzling that Hazanavicius opts for such a flip, reductive treatment of Godard. More likely, the jocose tone reflects Hazanavicius’s view of him as overrated – as a film-maker who’s worn a changing wardrobe of king’s new clothes for sixty years[1]. Even on those terms, Redoubtable fails to convince. Its remarkable achievement is to render incredible the idea that its ridiculous protagonist could make a decent movie – or even take anyone in.
Redoubtable is based on Un an après, Anne Wiazemsky’s 2015 memoir of her relationship with Godard. (According to Richard Brody, both Hazanavicius’s screenplay and his direction are a travesty of the source material.) Wiazemsky (who died last year at the age of seventy) and Godard (now eighty-seven) married in 1967, the year that saw the release of La Chinoise and Weekend, two of the three films he made in which she appeared. The action in Redoubtable centres on May ’68 in Paris and its immediate aftermath, and charts the rapid deterioration during that time in the principals’ relationship. (Although their marriage technically didn’t end until 1979, the couple separated long before that.) Wiazemsky, a granddaughter of François Mauriac, came to prominence, as an eighteen-year-old, in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966). The Godard of Redoubtable might just about have seduced the simple rustic Wiazemsky portrayed for Bresson but surely not the young woman that Hazanavicius presents: Stacy Martin, who plays her, has the face and body of a girl but suggests a quietly perceptive intelligence. Besides, in the early, Godard-in-love parts of the film, Louis Garrel lacks, as well as charm, vitality: he seems to be keeping the lid on things until Godard can show his true temperamental colours and start falling out with Wiazemsky.
The harsh timbre of Garrel’s voice and his lisp are an interesting combination – I assume the latter is part of his Godard impersonation but am not sure about the former. (I don’t recall seeing this actor before though he’s appeared in many films.) Garrel is a strong screen presence but this is itself problematic. Because he’s more physically imposing than the real Godard he loses out on the sympathy that an unprepossessing actor might have elicited. Except when intimidated by the massed ranks of students he’s anxious to impress, Hazanavicius’s Godard is an unstoppable talker and a bully. He might have been slightly less tiresome if we’d seen him as a man with a big brain overcompensating for his small stature. A scene in which Godard cruelly insults an admirer who’s written a thesis on his films might not be quite so offensive if Louis Garrel didn’t look capable of flooring the young man concerned (Laurent Soffiati) with fists as well as words.
Although Stacy Martin isn’t much of an actress, her character does gain your sympathy, thanks to being on the receiving end of Godard’s appalling behaviour for so long. Martin’s Twiggy-slender physique and her hairdo reflect a familiar image of 1960s chic but don’t resemble the more individual looks of the puffy-faced Anne Wiazemsky. Although she has little to do except argue with Godard, Bérénice Bejo, as Michèle Rosier, has more depth than either of the film’s leads. The supposed comic highlights of Redoubtable are breathtakingly feeble. A running joke has Godard getting his spectacles repeatedly trampled underfoot in street demonstrations. He applies glue to his fingertips – ‘an old political activist trick’ to disguise fingerprints – then answers the phone and tries to make notes and …. everything sticks to his fingers. He and Anne, both of them stark naked, discuss gratuitous nudity in cinema. The conversation is triggered by the jealously possessive Godard’s refusal to allow his wife to appear nude throughout Marco Ferreri’s The Seed of Man (1969). To underline the point and his self-awareness of what he himself is doing, Hazanavicius then cuts to Ferreri (Emmanuele Aita) shooting a scene on the film in which the male lead (Matteo Martari) doesn’t wear a stitch. Anne, by order of Godard, is clothed.
The title refers essentially to Godard’s towering reputation and specifically to a nuclear submarine: Jean-Luc and Anne hear a radio news report about ‘Le redoutable’ and compare themselves to its resilient crew. The film’s silliness has been compounded in its title for release in North America – Godard Mon Amour. Why give it a name that, for audiences with even a modest knowledge of movies, is bound to evoke the best-known work of a different New Wave director? The cutely stylish soundtrack doesn’t strike one as Godardian either – although the great man’s reported hostility to the concept of the film (‘stupid, stupid idea’) must have been further music to Hazanavicius’s ears. The end result seems enormously pleased with itself and with its triviality. I enjoyed The Artist in the cinema (though seeing it again on television left me cold) but there were plenty who loathed it and immediately marked Hazanavicius down as a wrong’ un. Redoubtable will have them rubbing their hands in vindication.
17 May 2018
[1] A recent interview with the Independent includes the following Hazanvicius quote on Godard: ‘I wouldn’t say he’s one our best directors … He’s one of the most free. He’s taken a very interesting path. But I do not consider him as one of the best.’
