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In Praise of Love review
:. Director: Jean-Luc Godard
:. Starring: Bruno Putzulu, Cécile Camp
:. Running Time: 2:00
:. Year: 1999
:. Country: France
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Jean-Luc Godard prefers questions over answers: through the quest of a young man in search of love, he revisits the very strong bond linking memory and love, both creators and matrices of myths. As each thing is multiple for Godard, Edgar's investigation on the Resistance takes on a heterogeneous significance and tends to give words and cinematic language their genuine essence: resistance against German brutality, against North American mainstream cinema, against forgetting and against falsity. An art dealer, Edgar seeks love in his chauffeur-driven car and in his discussions with old timers the way he seeks a masterpiece among forgeries and copies.
This complex pursuit takes the form of an internal monologue (communication with others is often beautiful but useless) whose innumerable references answer each other. From the stones that celebrate history (since this one must be told), to endings that give a sense of events, along with books and trains, each image fragment has its own resonance and if not linearity at least a story.
From Paris filmed in black and white, almost frozen in the beauty of its cafés and fountains, to a suffocating Brittany in saturated colors, Godard follows the tortuous route of a man who searches between youth and age for a good reason to keep going.
It was conceptual and rich enough to be promising. Godard continues here on the path of cinema as a personal experience, as a means of scientific knowledge where the cinematic image is an experiment. It sometimes works, as in a very beautiful scene where he suggests that cinema is no longer magical and that on the contrary magic is outside the spectacle. But if this love of contradiction is one of the director's greatest qualities, it is also one of his great weaknesses: by refusing the romanticism that he claims however to admire, by superimposing on an infinite game of mirrors made of meanings and references, he gets lost in unmethodical prattling that chloroforms the audience instead of waking them up. Just like "these people who speak like gold diggers to find the truth" and go through lot of gravel for a single nugget, he loses himself in a personal puzzle that only the initiated can solve. By trying to say too many things without giving them enough time to mature, he recalls one of the best line of Le Petit Soldat: the law of "l'emmerdement maximum" (extreme boredom).
Corinne Le Dour Zana
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