Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982)

If Sauve qui peut (la vie) represented Godard’s return to cinema, Passion illustrates how frustrated he still was with the artform and its limitations, at least its limitations in fulfilling the director’s lofty goals. “It’s hard to have to record everything,” says his stand-in, a director played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz. The line could work in the context of any filmmaking, but it especially speaks to Godard’s aims as a filmmaker. Aesthetically and politically, Godard has long sought to capture everything, and Sauve Qui Peut’s union of cinema and video techniques hinted at the possibility of a deeper, more inclusive form of filmmaking than Godard, or anyone else, had ever achieved. Yet it is Passion, alternately lifeless and one of the director’s funniest, most self-effacing works, that truly shows how the director might look forward to the next stage of his career. Indeed, as I watched it, I thought often not of Godard’s prior work (though it shares a few traits with previous movies, especially Contempt), but his latest, 2010’s Film socialisme.

In many ways, Passion feels like the groundwork for that film, still tied to the idea of a narrative but chafing under the limiting expectation of traditional filmmaking. In fact, what plot Godard assembles for Passion concerns the absence of one for the film-within-the-film, also titled Passion. On-set, we see tableau vivant recreations of various classical paintings, from Rembrandt to Goya to Delacroix. Actors stand still as the camera glides around them, probing the compositions of the paintings and finding new perspectives with which to analyze these pre-existing works of art. But as the camera moves along the first of these recreations, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Godard places over the shots the exasperated discussion of the producers as they ask Jerzy what the story is. Judging from their tone, this is not the first time they have asked the director this, and it certainly will not be the last.

Jerzy grows weary of his producers’ constant pressure, but even he despairs of the production. Or rather, he despairs of the production forcing him to stay in France and not permit him to return home to Poland to witness the Solidarity movement gaining momentum. Godard splits the film’s attention between Jerzy’s politically homesick stagnation and a farcical French replication of the Polish union uprising epitomized by Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a stuttering, inarticulate factory worker. As with her more serious Polish counterparts, Isabelle does not wish to dismantle the engine of production; she loves her work to the point that she comes into conflict with the factory boss (Michel Piccoli) because her way of doing things stresses the personal satisfaction of workers rather than the production-centric exploitation of them.

Godard shows off a bizarro sense for cross-cutting, switching from Jerzy’s perspective to Isabelle’s seemingly at every point either storyline looks as if it might develop a plot. Yet to say that Passion lacks a story because characters only talk obliquely about their artistic or political frustrations is akin to saying that a painting cannot tell a story because there are no words at all. Godard demonstrates the narrative possibilities of this other artform when he re-stages Delacroix’s epic The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, and in the process he reaffirms cinema’s capacity to tell narratives through images. After all, if a single image, such as Delcroix’s painting, can suggest an entire history and action, surely a film, composed of thousands of images conveyed in two dozen images per second, can do the same.

After a time, it becomes clear that Godard uses his jumps between the film set and factory to flesh out both realms. This can be seen in plain terms in the broader juxtapositions and alignments, especially in the treatment of women in the two settings. The all-female factory team that coalesces around Isabelle gets exploited by Piccoli, while the recreation of classical paintings on the film set necessitates hordes of women in various stages of undress (with an emphasis on full-frontal) being posed precisely by Jerzy and other men. During the Delacroix tableau, the actors playing Crusaders gallop through the miniature-scale Constantinople and chase and abduct the women actresses, who break and flee from the horses and their rapacious riders. When they do so, crew members grab them and place them back in their positions, chastising them for breaking even though their movement helps visualize the story suggested by Delacroix’s painting. In that sense, they are held back from doing their job well in the same way that Isabelle and her comrades are by Piccoli’s limiting, dehumanizing orders in the factory.

But these are the big themes and arcs of the film, and as John Hartzog notes, Godard manages to add color and meaning even to smaller bridges between the two storylines. Hartzog identifies the sly juxtaposition of Isabelle firing up her co-workers into their unorthodox revolt with the recreation of Goya’s The Third of May 1808, its depiction of a rebellion's brutal repression hinting at the fate of a worker revolt. Hartzog likewise identifies the climactic merging of the loss of Isabelle's virginity with a staging of El Greco's Immaculate Conception, though he does not fully illuminate this most puzzling of contrasts. On one level, of course, it is perhaps the most literal of the comparisons, stacking one virgin alongside the virgin, but Hartzog only hints at one possible interpretation when he says Isabelle's "innocent suffering for the dignity of work is given a religious dimension by this association with El Greco's sublime painting of the Virgin." This does not take into account the primary difference between Isabelle and Mary, which is to say the deflowering of the former, which complicates matters somewhat. If Godard compare the two to make Isabelle's struggle seem as spiritual as social, does he not also corrupt the Holy Mother in the process by association with sex? Though matched along several points of connection, the two images diverge enough to confound expectations and easy answers.

That vague disconnect is but one example of a tension between semi- or un-related images and sounds in the film at large. Dialogue is typically spoken over images that never quite line up to the speaker. When Godard does show the speaker as he or she speaks, he deliberately plays the sound out of sync, a playfully irritating gag that distances the viewer as much as the constant Brechtian remove of the film-within-a-film production. The characters get so out of whack that each distinct party starts to take on the technical language and behavior of the other, so that the factory workers use film terms and the film production resembles the industrial work that it really is.

Such alienating techniques display the director’s peevish side, but Passion also works as one of the director’s most inviting, moving films to this point. As the producers argue over what Jerzy could possibly be saying with the Night Watch recreation at the start, a voice warns the others not to “scrutinize” the shots and to pay attention to the actual humanity of the actors frozen in the tableau. This, of course, could be a reminder to Godard himself, who had been abstracting and sociopoliticizing the behavior of his actors and documentary subjects for most of his career, even the mainstream ‘60s work. Sauve qui peut offered the first corrective for this too-removed style, repurposing the slow/stop-motion techniques of his analytical video period into a humanist desire to let the most fleeting gestures linger. Aided by Raoul Coutard in his first collaboration with the cinematographer since Week End, Godard fills Passion with lush images, not only the functional art criticism of the tableaux vivants (an idea later refined by Lech Majewski for his recent The Mill and the Cross) but also diversionary shots like the film’s first, of a jet leaving a white contrail across the sky, the line eventually curving slightly with the Earth itself. As with Godard’s last feature, Passion shows a renewed dedication to capturing these gorgeous images simply for their beauty, a feat as impressive in its own right as Godard’s ability to etch an unexpectedly focused narrative from their ostensibly arbitrary contrast.

Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)

In a stroke of peevish irony, Jean-Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie), touted even by the director as his return to cinema, is a film of reactionary social retardation. Its three main characters represent a regression from the ideals espoused in Godard's first cinematic period and rigorously critiqued in his video projects. There's Paul (Jacques Dutronc)bay, a burned out video director standing in for Godard, even taking his surname; Paul's ex-girlfriend, Denise (Nathalie Baye) who has retreated into the countryside to find idyll and comfort and give up TV production for small-town journalism; and a prostitute (Isabelle Huppert) resurrecting the preferred symbol of capitalism in Godard's films, the ultimate display of the body become labor.

By calling it his "second first film," Godard himself seemed to acknowledge this step backward, casting his work as a look back instead of forward. Yet if both the crisp 35mm texture of the image and some aspects of the "story" (more on those quotation marks later) recall a period the director angrily left behind more than a decade earlier, Every Man for Himself nevertheless shows a considerable maturation and change in the filmmaker's approach and his obsessive themes. Where Godard's '60s films popped with formal revolution and ingenuity, the shots of this film are static like much of his video work. Likewise, the use of freeze-frames and slow motion apply some of the analytical techniques of video back to cinema. But if these attempts to modernize film still constitute a look backward for the director, the mood these techniques capture, of quiet reflection that makes the political human instead of vice-versa, marks a significant new step in Godard's work.

That's not to say that there isn't political content in this film. Paul lives a life surrounded by capitalist glitz. He lives out of gold-plated hotels and roams malls bustling with the inhuman roar of a large crowd, using his good looks to attract and use up women. And even a man, as the bellhop of one hotel is so smitten he outright begs the director to "bugger" him. If he feels uncreative in his actual work, Paul enjoys the tyrannical control of an auteur in the world around him. Godard's autocritical streak is nothing new, but the bourgeois shell into which he places his avatar is one of his most barbed pieces of self-criticism.

Further distinguishing Paul from other forms of the Godard's introspection is the manner in which the director attacks his own chauvinist tendencies. Whether it was Godard's own, constant reevaluation or the influence of Anne-Marie Miéville, the gradual evolution of the director's sexual politics reaches a new level of disgust with the lot of women. Though he works with video, Paul recalls some of the attitudes that dot Godard's work of the 1960s, not '70s. Conversations with other men reveal even darker impulses than the usual sexism. Paul even asks one friend if, because his daughter looks like his wife, he ever fantasizes about sleeping with his daughter. Other men prove even more vile. A scene at a petrol station holds on two men slapping a woman for refusing to choose between them, no one intervening as they wear her down with violence. And when local pimps discover that the prostitute Isabelle (Huppert) is operating on her own, they abduct her and subject her to a perverse spanking for her presumptuousness. "Only banks are independent!" shouts one of the pimps.

Godard then folds these misogynistic traits back into his larger political dissatisfaction, suggesting that Paul's misogyny is a manifestation of his failure to live up to his own ideals. Godard's previous work with Miéville gradually introduced an almost Joycean view of women into the director's canon, one that posits the woman as the true revolutionary force of the world. This idea was almost explicitly stated in France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants, and Godard here links a failure of the revolution with the failure of men to adapt their attitudes toward and treatment of women. "You mock the heritage system, yet now you act just like your father," Denise says to a friend, encapsulating the greatest cop-out of a generation that wanted to change everything but was about to enter a decade of rampant capitalistic excess (though France would elect a socialist to see them through the decade defined by Reagan and Thatcher).

Denise is a breath of fresh air, not only for her narrations that blend sexual and social rhetoric but for the imagery Godard associates with her. Where Paul roams over-lit, gilded constructs, Denise has retreated to the countryside, at once a reactionary surrender from modernity and a reflection of the elemental force of woman that cannot be fully tamed. The juxtaposition of Denise against sumptuous shots of nature bring to mind the water imagery of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake. Denise may have run away from it all, but Godard does not seem to begrudge her the way he chastises Paul for selling out his ideals.

Nevertheless, the director devotes most of his attention to the prostitute, clearly back on familiar ground with one of his favored types. Where the prostitutes in Godard's '60s films displayed some level of uncertainty in their lives, a pained struggle between what they want and what society has forced them into, Huppert plays Isabelle as a woman used to the capitalistic takeover of sex still in its infancy during Godard's early days. She approaches her job with such professional remove and micro-planning she could call herself an entrepreneur. She even holds something of a job interview with her sister, who is interested in her sibling's profession. Isabelle makes her sister undress and asks personal questions about her "qualifications" and "goals." And if local pimps accosted the woman to punish her independence, Isabelle herself is not too different from them, quickly clarifying that she would take half her sister's earnings.

The mordant humor of this sibling exchange is but one example of the strong return of Godard's sense of humor after inconsistently dotting the video period. Paul gives a lecture at a school where he writes a note on the chalkboard comparing cinema and video to Abel and Cain, a lofty, militant declaration that is deliberately deflated by its scribbling in a classroom before a group of uninterested students. In so doing, Godard pokes fun at his own flat rhetoric and its myopia: at the turn of the previous decade, Godard would only show his works for students, but now he parodies how useless such an academic circle jerk could be. Smaller jokes abound, whether it be Paul's suggestive cigar smoking or random, hilarious gags like a tired man asking his horny girlfriend to put her panties back on before they go inside a theater because he really does want to see a movie.

The funniest, darkest scene of all involves an elaborate bit of sex play that a studio producer and his assistant foist upon Isabelle and another prostitute. The producer makes increasingly insane, perverse demands of the women, and his assistant, as the scene plunges ever deeper into horror and black comedy. The whole sequence works as a grotesque indictment of men, capitalist power and, of course, the movie industry, a more direct and blunt attack than the intellectually rigorous deconstructions of all these in Godard's work with the DVG and Miéville, but also a more accessible and amusing one. In the middle of it all, Isabelle even calls to check on the apartment she's been eyeing, emphasizing the want-driven nature of it all even as it suggests Isabelle's method of reassurance and morale-boosting, her way of keeping her eye on the prize.

Scenes like these, and others, communicate a vast sense of sociopolitical dissatisfaction, and it's easy to see Godard as cynical. "It's all tricks," one character says. "There are no heroes. There are no winners. It's all bullshit." One shot even frames a photo of a Communist Chinese kid drinking a soda, literalizing Godard's once-incendiary notion of the children of Marx and Coca-Cola with an "Is that it?" letdown. Paul's disillusionment is underscored in the statement, "Even in a dream, one keeps looking for solutions." He longs for dreamless sleep, so that he might forget about the manner in which he abandoned the dreams he used to have.

Yet for all the anger and disenchantment running through Every Man for Himself, there is also a sense of great artistic hope. Godard brings video techniques back to cinema, but his slow motion and freeze frames do not break down social processes as they did in video works. Instead, Godard merely studies gestures or actions for their own sake, often highlighting nothing more than the beauty of an image. Even objects that clearly fill Godard with righteous scorn, such as a gas station, are captured with such splendid color that the polluting capitalism the setting represents is at least partially offset. (Godard would mine a gas station for even more stunning visual poetry in his latest Film Socialisme.) The aforementioned release the film finds in nature likewise offers a more complex side of a filmmaker previously seeking to out-modernize modernity. Perhaps the director considers a move to the countryside analogous to a return to cinema, at once a reactionary step backward and an open-minded inclusion of the old with the new. Godard's own career trajectory reflects this contradictory step forward: to see Godard get a director's credit that reads "un film composé" throws back to more than a decade earlier, before Godard started sharing creative credit with collaborators and before he stopped using film altogether. Yet that same credit also announces the start of yet another major phase in the career of a director constantly reinventing himself, a bold new start that would oversee a significant change in stylistic and thematic approach. Godard was "back," as they say, but would he be recognizable even to those who'd followed him through the video wilderness?

White Material

White Material is what Apocalypse Now might have been like if it were entirely from the perspective from the French plantation owners. They reside on the land of their fathers, aware of the world crumbling around them but steadfast in their desire to remain on what they feel is rightfully their property. When someone points out the futility of the situation, they spit at the idea of surrender.

The same holds true for Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), a coffee plantation owner. Claire Denis opens her film without any establishment of Maria's plantation and the social structure of the unnamed African country in which she lives. Instead, White Material opens as the country plunges into civil war, the camera gliding over horrific sights such as burning buildings and bodies laying in a line as if even a mass grave is too good for them. Child soldiers, government troops and marauding rebels/pirates scour the landscape.

At the center of them is Maria, who insists upon seeing her crop through to harvest. A helicopter reminiscent of the last chopper out of 'Nam circles over her, begging her to get out while she can. This is the first we've seen the helicopter, but the man with the megaphone says this is his last warning. To drive the point home, he throws down some survival kits as a final measure, the tiny, rectangular packages dropping like massive clumps of volcanic ash on a dusty road that suddenly feels even more arid and desolate. With a vague smirk, Maria continues on home.

Shot mostly with hand-held cameras on grainy stock, White Material initially gives off a hint of realism until Denis begins to twist and bend that aesthetic into her usual, more poetic style. There can be no mistake of the underlying politics of the film -- a vicious attack on European arrogance and privilege concerning Africa and other developing areas of the world -- but the loose plot allows it to broadcast its pedantic message while fleshing it out more subtly through the delicacies and nuance of Huppert's performance.

Saddled with a husband, André, (Christopher Lambert) who attempts to sell the plantation behind Maria's back to "save her from herself" and a feckless son (Manuel, played by Nicolas Duvauchelle) who uses the closing of the schools by rebels as an excuse to sleep in all day, Maria finds herself not only separated from an increasingly hostile indigenous population but from her own family. The only person she enjoys any relationship with is The Boxer (Issach de Bankolé), a rebel leader who hides out on the plantation to recover from a gut wound. Their bond, never particularly spoken, nor even communicate through body language -- both Huppert and de Bankolé are too rigid in their facial expression to let anything but strength radiate from them -- yet they enjoy the most complex relationship in the movie by virtue of one being a rebel seeking to tear down the other's way of life.

Wearing lightly colored clothes that make Huppert's fair skin seem even whiter, Maria looks almost alien among the African people. However, like those plantation owners in the long cut of Apocalypse Now, Maria sees no other option for herself. But in that fatalism lies a grim sense of Eurocentric pride. Huppert, with that stiff upper lip that would have served her well had she been born across the Channel, walks with a steely resolve and never backs down. When a band of rebels stop her truck and demand $100 to pass, she stares down their guns and calmly reminds the young men that she knows their parents as if she caught them trying to T.P. her house. By staying, Maria can look down upon the whites (and even some natives) who flee, but when she heads out to replace her vacated help with some more workers like an American heading to the nearest Home Depot to solicit manual labor, we see through her hypocrisy and realize that she will never be a true native of the country.

Maria says she does not wish to leave for France because she will grow soft and complacent. It's a defiantly feminist moment, and one that darkly suggests that a chaotic situation such as this is the only place where a woman can handle something as big as a plantation by herself. Yet the comforts of her own home far outstrip those enjoyed by poor Africans, and her attitude, delivered with a conviction that might signal her as heroic in another movie, here seems predatory. Along with that vile grin she gives the warning helicopter, this downplayed moment reveals the beast within, a woman who might actually get off on civil war because it allows her to feel superior. She continues to believe that persevering will win the respect of the natives, but they will never see her as one of them. Nothing exemplifies this more than José, the son of Maria's black ex-husband. Implicitly, Maria sees José as proof that she belongs in Africa and dotes upon him, but when she goes to collect him from school she reveals that she has no blood relation to José, nor any bond through marriage now that she and the boy's dad are divorced. She simply appropriates him the way she does everything else; hell, she even asks the boy to help in the field. When he later helps with the mounting mischief around the plantation, it becomes inescapably clear that no one wants Maria to stay.

Just as 35 Shots of Rum made up for its elliptical narrative by anchoring the film in locations, so too do recurring images form the tether that roots us to White Material. André drops his gold lighter, which child rebels pick up and show to The Boxer. The lighter is asinine, expensive and gauche, and it matches the eyesore that is the Vial plantation, parts of which are painted in awful golden-yellow. A gate with a chain and lock is meant to keep the plantation safe, but the guard ran off with the key leaving the padlock undone. Still, people continue to make as if securing the gate, though there are so many holes in the surrounding fence that even the show of pretending the gate works is a waste of time. Hand-held radios broadcast agitprop from a rebel presenter, a presenter who labels all Europeans "white material" and rails against the plantation owners. However, he also has a playful side, and at one point he even stops railing and plays music, bobbing along to the beat in his secret studio. When the official military finds him, they assure the airwaves that everything is under control, only to deliver a message more fearsome than anything the rebel broadcast. (This is foretold earlier in the film when a soldier acts as if Maria's cooperation in paying rebels' tributes makes her worse than the bandits.)

Already a political screed and a character study, White Material also morphs into a horror film through Denis' direction and Yves Cape's cinematography. The use of child soldiers dispenses with the more sensational aspects of City of God to capture the full terror of someone too young to have fully developed empathy being given authority to decide on the lives of others. I've always balked at the idea that children are the portraits of innocence, as that lack of developed empathy makes them selfish, and that romanticized innocence is but a sign that social conditioning and decorum have not been instilled. To see them simply appear on hills in beautifully scary shots engenders a gripping feel, a sense of unstoppable corruption and unyielding bloodlust. So mad are these children that they in turn drive the son, Manuel, to insanity when they beset the plantation and torture the young man with a disturbing mixture of premature hardness and a warped form of childhood playtime.

If White Material is occasionally too cynical and defeatist for its own good, the layers present in Huppert's performance and Denis' politics create a tone poem out of didacticism. One can easily draw parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan from the movie, seeing as how the white person continues to gently exploit indigenous people while hypocritically viewing herself as an equal (but an equal who's better than others), but the core theme of the film is the danger of pride in all its forms. Maria may indeed be too tough for France, but this unspecified country is certainly tougher than her, and the land itself appears to reject her like an immune system to a foreign contaminant. The final moments reveal that White Material's first shots were technically its last, only cementing the sense of inevitability to the destruction that awaits these characters. So set in stone is Maria's fate that when she at last breaks down, I did not react in shock so much as question what took her so long to see this coming.