Hardly one of JLG’s more springier films, I’m still, frankly, trying to put this one together.
Photography and production design are, as everything else Godard did in this period, perfect in their own pocket universe. I nearly passed out during the scenes at a fully mod airport. As I’ve said before, I’m hesitant to ever visit Paris because it won’t look like it does as shot by Raoul Coutard in the 1960s. Some debt is owed to Hiroshima, Mon Amour (indeed, there is an extremely quick shout out to Resnais toward the end of this film) for some of the evocative, lovers tryst shots – but where is it written that a good idea can’t be improved upon?
What bugs me about this film, though, is that I’m not sure what I am supposed to feel about the lead character. Because frankly, I hated her. She is a vapid imbecile…at least, that’s how I would feel about her if she was in my life. (She’s probably an anti-Semite, too, the way she offhandedly dismisses the scholar attempting to educate her on the Holocaust, but that’s another point.) Godard had yet to enter the surreal theatrics of La Chinoise or Le Week-end, so I don’t think he’s sending this woman up as a symbol of a corrupted soul. I think she represents a type that Godard felt was interesting to explore…similar to the female leads in, say, Vivre sa Vie or Contempt. The problem is that I just couldn’t stand this chick! (Maybe it was her face….she kept reminding me of someone I used to intern with during the semester I took a gig at VH-1 in 1995.) (I should also point out I didn’t much care for her obnoxious husband either. In fact, I don’t think I liked anyone in this movie. And I normally like people!)
I’ll tell you one thing, though. There is a lot of vintage underwear in this movie. One of the more entertaining sequences is a montage of magazine bra ads. Other than being a trip for graphic designers, this is supposed to give us some sort of empathy for our lead (she is being bombarded by images and signifiers! Sacre bleu!) but it comes too late. By then, I was waiting for this ditsy trollop to dig herself further into her pit of bourgeois ennui. Which she only kinda does. Oh, well.
