Redoubtable, the magic of Jean-Luc Godard

Thiruvananthapuram: The camera is shooting faces, men and women who walk by briskly, protesting. Suddenly a face turns towards the camera, recognises the man behind, and announces himself a huge fan. He lists out the movies he loves of the man, a filmmaker he is doing a thesis on. Jean-Luc Godard listens at first, but when the man goes on, he is annoyed. “Those movies are dead,” he says, “and so are you.” Godard’s young wife Anne Wiazemsky watches helplessly, as she has been every time he reacted unpredictably, angrily, a frustrated man who hated his own movies from the past.

Michel Hazanavicius, who made the Academy Award winning ‘The Artist’, has made a comic take on the life of one of the most renowned filmmakers of our time, Jean-Luc Godard, through his film ‘Redoubtable’, screened at the 22nd International Film Festival of Kerala. It is based on Anne’s account of her life with Godard, Un an après (One Year After), that came out as a book in 2015. Anne passed away this year, in October. She was hardly 20 when she got married to Godard. Stacy Martin plays her, and Louis Garrel becomes Godard, announcing among his many witty one-liners, that he is not Godard, only an actor playing one. It is the France of the late ‘60s when there was a civil unrest with demonstrations and strikes and student protests against capitalism, consumerism and American imperialism and traditional institutions.

Godard, seen actively participating in these, seems deeply attracted to the young ideas. “I don’t like old people. So when I am the older person, I don’t like myself,” he tells Anne when his speech is interrupted and ridiculed by a student. Godard wants to be part of it all, make movies that are democratic, he calls his older “funny” ones trash. These are, in Michel’s movie, expressed with humour, the characters often contradicting what they tell on the screen when they tell it. “I don’t understand the director’s fancy for undressing actors,” Godard’s character says in a scene he is naked. “In real life, there are no voiceovers that say Anne loves Godard,” he says another time, a second before a voiceover says, “Anne loves Godard.” Anne’s love is passionate at first, as she vehemently affirms her love for Godard when she is asked about her writer grandfather François Mauriac’s reactions to their relationship. But as Godard becomes more and more obsessed with the protests and youth ideas, she feels his alienation, bearing everything until he pulls a final stunt that she just cannot forgive.