Dialectical Godardianism
The New Wave's enfant terrible still can't shut up.

IN PRAISE OF LOVE
With Bruno Putzulu, Cecile Camp
Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

JEAN-LUC GODARD BELIEVES that the world is too complex for oral communication ever to succeed. And so he uses words whenever he can to make things even more incomprehensible, often leaving you, you might say, gasping for breath.

He was born to be French, and thus to take his place on the Gallic Mt. Rushmore of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, de Man, Metz and the other French language and cultural theorists who, if you read them long enough, will make you equivocate about scratching an itch or putting your pants on one leg at a time. (What is a "leg"? What are "pants"? Can we possibly ever truly comprehend the legiosity of pants or the pantsiosity of legs?)

But more than anything else, Godard is a fatal combination: a romantic misanthrope, searching for love and only finding man's and woman's inhumanity to man. "I. . .love. . .you. . .," his heroine chokes out at the end of Alphaville. And who could forget Jean Seberg's dazed betrayal at the end of Breathless?

For Godard in the early '60s, love was the answer and the question. By the end of the decade, in Weekend, he'd embraced revolution of a sort, but his radical chic still all came down to the beating of the human heart after making love. (Well, that - and cannibalism.) Maybe that's why it's so hard to take Godard seriously - or why, after all these years of intrepid self-indulgence, it's so hard to ignore him.

In Praise of Love is as convoluted and difficult to follow as anything Godard has done (and, at 72, is likely to do, if he has any mercy left in him). The movie's story (what is "story"?) ostensibly concerns Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), a filmmaker in his 30s who can't quite define his current "project" (what is - oh, never mind), although he has an amorphous notion that it's about the three stages of life (childhood, "adulthood," old age) and the four stages of love (meeting, physical passion, separation, reconciliation). In the course of trying to figure this out, he talks to elderly people and wanders about the streets of Paris with a woman, reflecting on life, existence, history, culture, homelessness and the self.

This framework is all Godard needs to traipse through more ideas in 97 minutes than the law should allow. After all these years he's still fascinated by Marx, although Onan might be a better frame of reference this time. It's hard to tell what Godard cares about more: social justice - as if the mere mention of "Kosovo" is something profound - or the anti-narrative complexity of his own "art." He's not saying anything new when he tells us that people react to the accounts of actual concentration camp survivors in the same way they react to a TV show about the subject, or when he says, "When the facts become legend, print the legend."

And so watching In Praise of Love becomes a chore of waiting for that interesting morsel among the meanderings. To wit: kids and the elderly have prescribed social identities, but people in middle age do not (interesting); there's no emptiness because there's always a voice somewhere (not interesting); you can only think about something when you think of something else (not interesting - his example is a banal dialectic); the Bible isn't a theory about God but rather a theory about man (very not interesting); we should discuss the content of Titanic and not its worldwide success (mildly interesting, although the latter depends upon the former).

One of Godard's subplots in In Praise of Love concerns an old French couple who fought in the Resistance and who are now meeting with one of Spielberg's people to sell their story. This allows him to write an amusing riff on how the United States is a country without a name (Mexico and Brazil are both "united states of America"), and to share with us the tidbit (true?) that Mrs. Schindler got no money from Spielberg and now lives in poverty in Argentina. "Washington is the real director of the ship," says one of his characters, "and Hollywood is only the steward." Interesting. (But does Godard really expect his brand of intellectual cinema to counterbalance Hollywood and influence the world?) And at the end of In Praise of Love, as if foreshadowing our November elections and the Department of Homeland Security, Edgar says, "History is coming, with a big H."

What this all adds up to depends upon how good you are at math. Suffice it to say Godard's essay, laced with self-references to art and cinema, contemplates the meaning of the past, how we understand and remember it, if we understand and remember it, and even if we can. Speaking of the past: I recently rented Godard's dizzying Weekend and found that someone had stopped the tape about 30 minutes in without bothering to rewind it. So now I naturally wonder whether the tape's previous owners watched it once and only had time to watch 30 minutes of it a second time, or if they decided to cut their losses and stop the first time through. Then as now, with Godard one never knows.