Godard biopic has merits, but ultimately comes up short
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The double bind of Redoubtable (known in some circles as Godard Mon Amour) is that anybody who knows enough about Jean-Luc Godard to be interested in this movie probably won’t enjoy it, and those who have little to no idea who Jean-Luc Godard is will wonder why they should care.
It’s not a bad film, by any stretch of the imagination, it’s just that it feels… a little pointless.
The movie purports to tell the story of how the love between Godard and his second wife Anne Wiazemsky (whose memoir the film in based on), but in reality it’s more of a record of how much nonsense some women are willing to put up with from their man, especially if the world has labeled him as exceptional.
A primer for those that are unfamiliar with Godard: he is one of the greatest film directors of all time, and by a wide margin one of the most insufferable. It is to director Michel Hazanavicius’ credit that he doesn’t sand the edges off of the notoriously prickly genius. But the trajectory of the story has a thudding inevitability that would have rankled to no end the very man who inspired it.
You’ve got to be a very special kind of asshole for your shtick not to get old over the course of 100 minutes. And while Godard is special in a lot of ways… that ain’t one of them.
Louis Garrel plays Godard (and his very casting might be the single best joke in the entire film), whom we join as he and Anne (portrayed by Stacy Martin, who, having worked with Lars von Trier on Nymphomaniac, is clearly no stranger to difficult artists) attempts to promote his tribute to Mao and student revolutions, La Chinoese. The film’s reception is… less celebratory than he hoped, and an insecure Godard becomes increasingly petulant and abrasive, especially considering that every 100 feet someone is telling him how much they love his old work.
And it’s here that the film exposes its largest stumbling block: whether he intended to or not, Hazanavicius seems to be making the argument that those earlier funnier films actually were better. And that’s a reductive read on a truly fascinating filmmaker with a truly fascinating career.
Godard’s restless searching for new forms of filmmaking is ultimately what defined him and his legacy; put aside his (confusing, often willfully contradictory and belligerent) politics and focus on his artistry, and you have a director who hasn’t stopped innovating for sixty years (as was recently announced, he has a new film set to premiere at the 2018 Cannes film festival). To watch his films in chronological order is to trace the evolution of a man who found himself constantly bumping against the constraints of what was possible in film.
It’s kind of the only story worth telling when it comes to Godard (if, indeed a story needs to be told about him at all). Instead we get a fairly by-the-numbers romantic drama, goosed by some film nerd in-jokes and Hazanavicius’ aping of early period Godard’s bag of tricks. And even that would be fine, if the movie was at all interested in the subversive glee of putting a crotchety iconoclast like Godard in the kind of artificial fluff he would have despised.
But for that to work, you’d have to make Wiazemsky the focus character (which would make sense, seeing as how it’s her book that’s being adapted in the first place). And perhaps it is. But Garrel’s performance of Godard’s corrosive energy overpowers everything, relegating Wiazemsky to the background. Martin tries her best to keep up, but she just isn’t given enough to work with.
Still, just because an idea is inherently wrongheaded doesn’t always mean it can’t still function as a reasonable time passer. The Godardian pastiche bits, while reductive, do give the film a bit of a boost. But the only real time the film comes close to approximating a Godardian touch without just mimicking his old stuff is in an extended series of shots where Anne and her traveling companion Michele Rosier (Berenice Bejo, in a delightfully wry performance) wolf down chicken with borderline lascivious glee.
When the movie opts for comedy, however, the results tend to be far more effective; a floundering Godard workshopping an anti-Semitic epigram in front of a less-than-receptive audience of college students is all the more amusing for its matter-of-fact approach to transgressive material.
(The by-now infamous among viewers scene where Martin and Garrel debate the merits of nudity in film while both appearing totally nude themselves, being a total lay-up of a gag, is less successful…)
In the end, there are merits to the film, to be sure. The supporting performances are mostly fantastic, particularly Felix Kysyl as the gimlet-eyed Jean-Pierre Gorin, who was about to usher Godard into his single least accessible period. And Gregory Gadebois is frequently very funny as the film critic turned director Michel Cournot.
So yes, there are virtues to Redoubtable. But as a tribute to one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, it just comes up a little short.
