New York Film Festival Presents Most Comprehensive Godard Retropsective

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 09 October 2013 10:55

Written by Jack Angstreich

This year's New York Film Festival's comprehensive retrospective, Jean-Luc Godard - The Spirit of the Forms, programmed by Kent Jones and Jake Perlin, runs from the second week of the 51st New York Film Festival and continuing through the end of October - the 30th.

 It features a new 35-millimeter print of Hail Mary, a modern day re-telling of the Virgin Birth, one of the stronger films of the director's late period.

Godard here creates a dialectic between a corrosive irony, where he satirizes hagiography, and an exalting celebration of the miracle of nature. Myriem Roussel is the eponymous heroine, her face and body serving as an inspiration for the filmmaker who focuses considerable attention on photographing her. (A very young and lovely Juliette Binoche has a small part as Mary's sexual and romantic rival for Joseph's affections.)

Hail Mary was released with a preceding short film, The Book of Mary — about the emotional effect of her parents' separation on a young girl — by Godard's longtime collaborator, Anne-Marie Miéville. This is a sensitive and memorable work — influenced by Godard but by no means a derivative enterprise — with the superb participation of actors Bruno Cremer and Aurore Clement. Miéville was to fulfill the promise of The Book of Mary with her first feature, the underrated My Favorite Story.

The Film Society is screening these preceded by a bonus short video, Godard's Small Notes regarding the film, Je vous salue, Marie. This essay-cum-promotional-ad is not aesthetically rewarding in itself but anything that sheds light on the intentions of an artist of the stature of Godard is of interest, as is this.

The mesmerizing Everyman for Himself can with some justice be seen as the film that inaugurated Godard's late phase and the filmmaker's return to commercial features. The story is an intricate one, plotting the intersection of a Swiss television director named Paul Godard (played by French pop star, Jacques Dutronc), the girlfriend he has recently broken up with (the gorgeous Nathalie Baye) who places an ad in a newspaper to rent out (or sell?) her apartment in the countryside, and a prostitute that eventually answers that ad, played in a brilliant and subtly comic performance by Isabelle Huppert. The Film Society presented a strong 35-millimeter print.

Pierrot Le Fou, a lovers-on-the-run film noir starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina and arguably the masterpiece among Godard's works of the 1960s, was also screened in a strong, 35-millimeter print — from Rialto — where the vividness of the primary color scheme characterizing the great cinematographer Raoul Coutard's extraordinary widescreen photography was often palpable. (This work features an outstanding score by Antoine Duhamel, an unsung composer who also composed music for the films of François Truffaut.)

Passion is another major but extremely challenging work from the 1980s — Jerzy Radziwilowicz plays a Polish director making a film while romantically involved with two women: one, portrayed by Hanna Schygulla, the wife an industrialist (Michel Piccoli), and the other a factory worker with a stutter, played by Isabelle Huppert. (The actor, Laszlo Szabo, who has appeared in many Godard works, has the role of the producer of the film-within-the-film.)

The complications in the story include labor politics, the Solidarity movement, and the film business but the plot is especially difficult to summarize. Raoul Coutard's photography here is among the most remarkable in his glorious career and I was grateful that the 35-millimeter print here had excellent color. 

The rarely screened A Married Woman observes the life of an attractive young woman — wonderfully incarnated by the exquisite Macha Meril in her most celebrated role — who is conducting an adulterous affair. Again photographed by Coutard, this is one of several magnificent black-and-white films that Godard made in the 1960s and the programmers deserve applause for finding such a sumptuous 35-millimeter print of this unjustly neglected work. 

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