Argument
In this idyll, the shepherds Corydon and Battus, taking a rest from their labors, begin to discuss a recent film review written by Anthony Lane, a disreputable goatherd from the island of Manhattan. The review was of In Praise of Love (Éloge de l’Amour), by Jean-Luc Godard. If Cupid is the Poet’s God of Love, then the Muse Clio and her mother Mnemosyne are just as important. But more particularly I think, in the person of Lane is meant someone who scorned Love and History and Memory so long, till at length him self was entangled, and unawares wounded with the dart of forgetfulness, which is Hades’ arrow.
*****
Corydon:
Greetings, Battus. Leave your flocks to graze by the water’s edge and sit under this oak tree to enjoy the evening’s dying glow with me. Yonder orangish hue is not unlike the color of the sea off the coast of France in the digital video portion of Godard’s latest film, Éloge de l’Amour.
Battus:
Ah, but it hasn’t come around to the multiplex near my pastures yet. Is the sea truly orange in Godard’s film?
Corydon:
Do you doubt me? The effect is even more stunning because the first part of the movie is in painfully beautiful 35mm black and white film. The 35mm portion takes place in Paris, where Edgar, a young director, is casting a film. The focus of his casting efforts slowly emerges, a young woman known simply as “Her.” The film is suffused with melancholy, never more so than when we learn that “She” is dead. It is at this point that the film jumps back two years into the past when Edgar first meets “Her.” The movie switches to digital video and the intense over-saturated colors I referred to earlier. As with a lot of Godard, the plot doesn’t matter as much as what happens on the way through the plot. Along the way, the film explores how we are able to live with evil, both that committed by others and by us, as well as the presence of the past, as well as the subject suggested by the title. Let us not forget that Godard is one of the great cinephiles in addition to being someone who cares deeply for the legacy of human culture, and so part of his focus is on what destroys these things, the objects of his love. I am reminded of what Jacques Demy said about his film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg--I paraphrase--that it is a film against war and against all of those things that destroy our happiness.
Battus:
It surprises me to hear you be so . . . well, in praise of Godard. I’ve only been able to read the noisome critical reception it’s been gathering, and it’s as if they’re trying to destroy the film. You’d think that Godard’s days as a provocateur were over by now. Did you see Anthony Lane’s review in The New Yorker? It seemed representative of a whole new wave of grousing against Godard. Critics in the popular press act as if they’d had to down a draught of sour wine, although in vague enough terms that their readers are left to wonder about their ability to taste.
Corydon:
Indeed. The consensus, of which Lane is a fine example, seems to be that it’s too bad that Godard’s “anti-Americanism” (which is conceived of as a cranky kind of personality quirk) muddies what is otherwise a lovely film.
Battus:
It was hard not to see the ghost of September 11th all over that review, particularly in the beginning where Lane expresses surprise at the recklessness that causes the distributors to release the film near the anniversary of that day. Is there anything in the film to suggest such a connection?
Corydon:
No, but September 11th has had a way of subsuming all into itself. It’s curious: one of the most-quoted lines in the film is one of the characters saying, essentially, “Americans have no past, and so must buy the pasts of others.” Lane is bothered by this, and by his feeling that Godard himself is too much in the past. In fact, this whole notion of the past is a key one that Lane returns to again and again, and in doing so, he makes Godard’s point about Americans having no past for him.
The most troubling thing for me was Lane’s thin-skinned defensiveness, which seems to inhabit much American thinking whenever any kind of critique is launched against us. I won’t say that this defensive posture is a post 9/11 phenomenon, because it was fully in evidence well before. This defensiveness is only possible through a kind of historical amnesia that finds the past and the future in the present. Lane writes that
a character sits and intones the words “Julia Roberts” and “Hollywood” as if these were evils on which we could all agree . . . As for his loathing of Hollywood, it is a regrettable coda to a body of work that, in its greener days, made lavish reference to the Hollywood musical, say, and the iconography of Bogart.
