Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (111 page)

The actress agonizes; the director broods.
(TCD-Prod DB © Peripheria / DR)

from America from Columbus to today, to T-shirts, to McDonald’s.” With Portugal in mind, Godard read
The Book of Disquiet
, the philosophical, diary-like novel by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, which was posthumously published in 1982 and appeared in French ten years later as
Le Livre de l’intranquillité
. Godard then abandoned his first proposal for Branco in favor of
Le Film de l’intranquillité
, an analytical project that would concern “the basic gestures of cinematographic creation, not the shooting of a film.” For this outline, Godard received an advance on receipts from the CNC but subsequently decided that he did not have enough ideas for a feature film and put the project aside.

Soon after, Godard happened to read an article in
Le Monde
by Philippe Sollers in which he criticized Susan Sontag for her 1993 voyage to besieged Sarajevo to mount a production of Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. Sollers’s argument was, in Godard’s words, that “they’re already miserable enough. She shouldn’t put on Beckett over there. She should do Marivaux.”
³
This gave Godard the idea to make a film about a production in Sarajevo of
The Game of Love and Chance
, a play by Marivaux; the film would be called
The Game of Love and Chance in Sarajevo
. Then, as Godard later recalled,

I went to buy a copy of Marivaux at the little bookstore in Rolle… But, of course, they didn’t have any Marivaux. On the other hand, they had a Musset, which was
One Doesn’t Trifle with Love
. So the film became
One Doesn’t Trifle with Love in Sarajevo
, which sounds much better, I think. I imagined that in the film there would be two or three young people who would go off to put on this play in Sarajevo. It would be about their adventures on the road and the places where they would stop along the way. And they wouldn’t get where they were going.
⁴

Godard decided to put all three elements—the trip to Sarajevo, the study of filmmaking, the essence of music—into one film. The project was built around a familiar pair: a young woman and her father, an old movie director who would be something of a stand-in for Godard. The young woman would organize the trip to Sarajevo to put on Musset’s play and would bring along a young man, her cousin, and another young woman, her parents’ maid; the old director, who was frustrated in his effort to make a movie—in particular, to find actors for his movie—would join them but chicken out en route. His daughter and her cohorts would be killed by Serb paramilitaries, and the mourning director would make his film with great difficulty. Music would be the closest thing to consolation and redemption that he finds.

The filming was supposed to begin in January 1996, but Godard’s troubles mimicked those of the director in the film: he had difficulty finding
actors. To play the role of the young man, Godard had his assistant, Gilbert Guichardière, videotape actors reading from Musset’s play. He offered the role to Frédéric Pierrot but then took it back because he didn’t like the actor’s long hair (which he had grown for a World War I movie he was acting in at the time). By chance, Anne-Marie Miéville saw an actor in a TV movie and told Godard she had found the man for the part: it turned out to be Pier-rot, and Godard called him back within hours to offer him the role again.

Godard also had great trouble finding someone to play the actress in the film that would be made following the young people’s death en route to Sara-jevo. After long searches, he happened to notice a picture on a casting agent’s desk and called the actress in. Bérangère Allaux was a first-year student at the Ecole nationale de l’art dramatique (National School of Dramatic Art) in Strasbourg, one of the eleven young performers in her class who had been culled from two thousand applicants. Godard met her at his office in mid-December 1995, six weeks before the shoot, and offered her the role—of the actress who, in the film, remains nameless. He gave her no screenplay. As Allaux later recalled, “I had no idea what I was going to do in the film. Neither did he. What I knew was that I was the Actress—that I represent all the actresses with whom he had filmed.”
⁵

To prepare Allaux, Godard had her watch Ava Gardner in
The Barefoot Contessa
and
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
. Soon thereafter, he told her that she was not really his kind of actress, because she was too “carnal.” She responded, “If I’m not your kind of actress, too bad,” and got up to leave, but Godard, surprised, called her back. Allaux admitted that she behaved impulsively and temperamentally; the dark-haired, dramatic young woman with a “carnal” presence and impulsive temperament had a great effect on Godard. He was in the grip of a terrible crush, which exerted a powerful influence on his behavior and on his creative activity after the film was completed. Bérangère Allaux became the main character in his life, and his primary effort in that time was to find a way to represent that relationship on film and to use the cinema to keep it going in life.

I
N THE FILM
, the daughter, Camille (Madeleine Assas), an out-of-work professor of philosophy (as well as Albert Camus’s granddaughter), recruits her cousin, Jérôme (Frédéric Pierrot), who is in love with her, and her family’s maid, Djamila (Ghalia Lacroix), to accompany her to Sarajevo. Her father, Vicky Vitalis (Vicky Messica) a taciturn, elderly director who is frustrated with the slow and uncertain course of pre-production on a film, decides to join them.

In midcourse, at a border crossing, after exhorting his companions to grand deeds, Vitalis abandons the three young people and goes home. They
continue on foot into Bosnia and are captured by Serb paramilitaries. Djamila is separated from the others and vanishes. Camille and Jérôme are raped by their captors, then, during an outbreak of fighting, die in a ditch they had been forced to dig.

Vitalis resumes work on his film and completes it, with tragicomic difficulty. When it is finished and rejected by the public he retreats to a concert hall where a seraphic young man is playing a Mozart piano concerto with a youth orchestra.

In January 1996, the shoot began with the most physically demanding action, the young people’s trip to Sarajevo and their doomed captivity; but Godard and the crew did not go to Sarajevo. Rather, the war scenes were filmed in forests on the French side of Lake Geneva. For the Serb paramilitary base, Godard rented a dilapidated old manse—the ruins of his maternal grandparents’ house, which now belonged to a Saudi prince and had been abandoned to the elements and left without windows, doors, and in some places, walls. The derelict palace of civilized treasures was itself a sign of a Europe gone to ruin. At a moment during the shoot in the blasted house, Jérôme and Camille point to markings on a wall and read them aloud: the record of dates and heights of Jean-Luc Godard and his siblings as they grew up. (Although Godard put the shot in the film, he removed the voices from the sound track.)

The filming took place in very cold weather; the ground was dusted with snow, but the actors playing Camille and Jérôme were stripped to their underwear in the unheated, wind-blown house. They had to walk, barefoot, on the cold ground and in icy mud. The shoot was gruelling, and it required careful practical organization on the part of Godard and the technical crew. For the battle, Godard rented tanks and sent them barreling down the long, unpaved driveway toward the house and brought in pyrotechnicians to create realistic explosions disturbingly near the actors. One mortar on a strand in the lake was manned by Godard himself (his face is not visible but his silhouette is familiar), who dropped a shell into its barrel and quickly turned and covered his ears as it shot its charge.

The action involved highly technical choreography integrating much equipment and many extras; Godard knew he needed to film the sequence but had little desire to do so. He called Romain Goupil for help with the scene, confiding his lack of interest in it.
⁶
Goupil was not available, however, and Godard oversaw the shoot himself; his reluctance is evident in the results. The rote, dull violence is de-aestheticized, a theatrical replica of war that presents neither the range of its horrors nor its vicarious thrills.

In the face of the hardships of the shoot, Godard was particularly tender with his long-suffering young actors. On the first day, he showed an actor
playing a paramilitary how to strike Pierrot on the hand with a rifle butt, and accidentally drew blood. To Pierrot’s astonishment, the director took Pier-rot’s hand in his, wiped the blood, and licked the wound clean, which Pierrot recalled as “the gesture of a father.”
⁷

Godard’s stringent preparatory work with the actors was unusually calm. He slipped dialogue for Pierrot and Madeleine Assas under the door of their hotel rooms without specifying which lines were meant for which role and asked them to learn the texts by rewriting them in their own handwriting, which, as Pierrot later recalled, he explained as the way to internalize the lines: “For him it is very important that, for the writer, the work passes from the head to the arm to the hand to the paper. He says that to learn a text, to really understand it, the relationship must be reversed: the text must pass from the paper to the hand up to the head.”

As ever, Godard wanted his actors to overcome their inhibition in his presence and to speak to him about the substance of the film, complaining to Pierrot the evening before the shoot started, “I sent you the text but you haven’t said anything to me. I should have made you pay me for the text; if you had paid 3,000 or 5,000 francs, you would have said something—you would have felt you had the right to say something, to say that the text doesn’t work.” When Pierrot took Godard up on the challenge, approaching him in the hotel restaurant to point out a shift in subject, the director responded with warm gratitude.

Godard’s solicitude reflected the subject of the film, the relationship of an older filmmaker to young people close to his heart: where
Hélas pour moi
treated the issue of transmission theoretically and philosophically,
For Ever Mozart
treated it dramatically and intimately. The center of the film, both formally and morally, is the dividing line between the young people’s ordeal and the beginning of Vitalis’s shoot of his own work. Not only does Vitalis, with his hortatory rhetoric, press the young people onward to their destruction, but he is unable to make his film until after their death: his mourning for them, together with his self-loathing, are the stuff of his art.

In
For Ever Mozart
, Godard self-revealingly dramatizes the tragedy of transmission after the end of the cinema. If he was to be the last of the line, then those who presumed to follow him were merely passing him on the way to the abyss. Not only was there nobody to whom to pass the torch, but those who would accept it from him were being lured to their doom—and only in mourning for them could his own work find its true meaning.

T
HE SHOOT OF
the film-within-a-film, which Godard had originally called
The Film of Disquiet
and now called
The Fatal Bolero
, took place at the end of January 1996 on a beach near Bordeaux. It depicts the pathetic comedy of
the cinema, the attempt to make art in the context of pimplike producers and the self-important underlings they employ. The producer, an arrogant old man signing checks at a table in a deserted casino, supervises his overripe and no-longer-young daughter, who is studying for her “baccalaureate exam in cinema” by taking dictation from a tape recorder emitting grotesque pornographic phrases. The production manager comes in to announce that he has found “really cheap actors”—meaning the newcomer Bérangère Allaux—for Vicky Vitalis’s project.

Allaux’s first scene is one of utter passivity and vulnerability: playing a corpse in Vitalis’s film, she is dragged, nude and inert, onto the sand by one of Vitalis’s assistants and placed alongside a naked young man. They lie side by side and exposed on the frigid shore of the wintry beach; another assistant then covers her with a red gown and the young man with a coat. The two are the cinematic representations of Vitalis’s dead daughter and her cousin, but Vitalis decides not to film the scene, and merely contemplates it in search of inspiration.

Allaux was thus introduced to the cinema limp and naked, a subject of violence and an object of desire. She understood that the moment was, for Godard, an unconcealed form of personal gratification and emotional compensation. “He shows in his films what he doesn’t have in his life,” she later said. “He likes vulnerable young girls.”
⁸
As they worked, Godard told her, “I have gotten you to enter into the house of the cinema,”
⁹
and he made sure that she knew it to resemble a whorehouse.

When Vitalis begins to shoot his film, he does so with an ancient movie camera, a boxlike device on a wooden-legged tripod, which he sets up behind a large glass sliding door inside a beachfront house. Allaux’s role in it is undefined; she wears a vast, old-fashioned gown and, standing outside on the beach, is buffeted by a terrible winter wind. She attempts to recite her text on-camera—“Since I am unemployed, in these slow and empty hours a sadness comes to mind from the depths of my soul…”—but the wind forces her to shout the words in order to be heard, and she stumbles over her lines. Vitalis says, contemptuously, “Don’t worry, we’ll simplify it,” and reduces her text to a single word,
Oui
, which, as the camera rolls, she attempts to speak to suit Vitalis’s pleasure. They reach take fifty-nine. After each pronouncement of “Oui,”Vitalis calmly says, “Non,” calling for another take. Now, Allaux howls and shrieks the single word, as Vitalis himself murmurs the number of the takes—115, 217, 303, 445, 517, 608 (for Godard, a recollection of Charlie Chaplin’s reported 900 takes of a single shot in
City Lights
)—until she yells “Oui!” at him and, exhausted from the effort, stretches out on the cold sand. Meanwhile, Vitalis, seen from behind in his stolid immobility, hunched heavily in his coat and beneath his hat, remains impassive, mutely bearing
the dreadful burden of grief and guilt that concentrates his formerly dispersed and slackened powers of creation into her single word, which she delivers at the price of her agony.