Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (112 page)

Allaux’s role in
For Ever Mozart
is an unusual one: though central to the film and to Godard’s work, she hardly had anything to do in it. She found Godard’s emphasis on the spoken text, to the exclusion of an actor’s identification with character, antithetical to acting: “In acting, there must be pleasure,” she said, and considered Godard’s comportment on the set an obstacle to any such physical pleasure in performance. “Godard did not even dare speak too loudly,” she later recalled, “he whispered, ‘Is everyone ready? Let’s shoot.’ For him, it was a cathedral, the shoot. That’s why the bodies don’t come into play; one doesn’t let bodies exult in a cathedral.”
¹⁰
Indeed, her body does not exult; it rages and rises in revolt—if apparently against the wind, in reality against Godard and his methods.

In the concluding section of
For Ever Mozart
, Vitalis has finished his film,
The Fatal Bolero
, and is presenting it at a provincial movie theater where a number of patrons are waiting in line. One hopes the film will have no “poetry,” another asks whether it has “tits,” or “titties,” or even “bazooms,”
¹¹
and some young people in line decide to go elsewhere to see
Terminator 4. The Fatal Bolero
is a flop; while the public is mocking it, Vitalis wanders into a concert hall where an orchestra and a young pianist with long, flowing hair, a ruffled shirt, and a frock coat are playing a Mozart piano concerto.

Why Mozart?

Because Mozart, who died poor and unappreciated, labored under the demands of his patrons and suffered the accusation of composing with “too many notes”—an accusation spoken in the concert hall by a member of the audience—to which Vitalis responded disdainfully, “So they think.”
For Ever Mozart
ends with Vitalis sinking down into a crouch in the shadows on a staircase in the concert hall. The gesture is the same as that of the ill and weary theater director Julian Marsh (played by Warner Baxter), at the end of
Forty-Second Street:
Vitalis, like Marsh, has given his last measure of strength and health for his show, yet the crowd dismisses his achievement.

A
FTER THE SHOOT
, Godard spent a week with Allaux at her family home. There he talked at length with Allaux’s father (a veteran of the Algerian War) and her grandmother (who was Jewish and had survived deportation to a concentration camp during the Second World War). He played tennis and rode horses. Yet the ambiguities of their friendship were troubling both to Godard and to Allaux. As she later recalled, “I did not need either a father
or a grandfather or a boyfriend, and he wanted to be all three.”
¹²
When the film was completed, in late spring of 1996, the confusion worsened. According to Allaux, “I went to see
For Ever Mozart
in the sound studio at Joinville [a suburb of Paris]… I arrived with my best friend, a man, by motorcycle. We got there and Godard wept, saying, ‘How can you do this to me?’ He insulted me, called me a whore. I had gone from Ava Gardner, the Barefoot Contessa, to a whore.”
¹³

Godard nonetheless involved Allaux in the presentation of
For Ever Mozart
. It was scheduled for a fall release, but he offered the premiere to the city of Sarajevo, where, in June, it would be the opening-night screening in a series of recent French films under the auspices of the French Cultural Services. He intended to go to Sarajevo, along with Allaux and others from the cast, to present it. But before the trip could take place, Anne-Marie Miéville asked Godard to take over, “at a moment’s notice,”
¹⁴
the male lead in her new feature film,
Nous sommes tous encore ici
(We Are All Still Here), and he accepted. (Allaux did in fact accompany it, and read a note from him to the Sarajevo audience.)

The next screenings, several days later, were also arranged around the presence of Allaux: Godard introduced
For Ever Mozart
at another pre-release premiere—this time, in Strasbourg, where Allaux lived and studied. The event was of major local interest, and Godard threw himself into it energetically, offering the new film for the opening night of a three-week series of his rarer films, including
King Lear
(which was yet unreleased in France), which he provided. He also held a related public discussion with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was now a member of the European Parliament, located in Strasbourg. Yet the festivities took a melodramatic turn. Jean-Louis Martinelli, the director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg (TNS), with which the Ecole nationale de l’art dramatique was affiliated, observed the pathetic conclusion to the night of the premiere, when Godard, who had brought his car to drive Allaux back to her parents’ house, could not find her after the screening. Martinelli saw Godard wandering desperately through the streets in search of the young woman, and, struck by the pathos of the moment, likened him to King Lear.
¹⁵

M
IÉVILLE, IN HER
new film, also presented Godard in a diminished, beleaguered aspect, though there he is diminished, rather, to a brilliant but unsocialized child. Her second feature film,
Lou n’a pas dit non
(Lou did not say no), from 1993, dramatized the difficult relationship between a crabby, narrow, hyper-literary man and a woman artist who strikes out on her own as a photographer without wanting to detach herself completely from him. In the new film,
Nous sommes tous encore ici
, Miéville had a similar idea for the lead male role, an older actor, Robert, with sedentary habits and set ways.

Nous sommes tous encore ici
is in three parts. The first section features a woman, played by Aurore Clément (a slight but commanding actress with wavy blond hair like Miéville’s) discussing with her friend (played by Bernadette Lafont) the definition of the “good man,” in a text derived from Plato’s
Gorgias
. The second part features Robert, the actor, who climbs up to an empty stage to rehearse his performance of a monologue taken from a text by Hannah Arendt. The third and longest part shows the life of this “good man” with the woman who chose him, the one played by Clément. The couple agonize over taking a long-deferred trip to visit museums in Italy. She criticizes his habits, his hat, his jacket, his sexism, his driving, his selfishness, his moods, his silences, and then adds, “Would you say that you’ve learned to keep quiet? I’d say rather that you permit me to speak, isn’t that already a lot?” After a dinner (in a hotel dining room) replete with such criticism, Robert looks like a chastised little boy. She wants to take a walk; he refuses, and returns to their room to read. She takes her walk and lets herself be accompanied by a man, the hotel pianist, whom she embraces. When she returns home with Robert, she accuses him with coldness, throwing at him lines that Godard spoke in
Histoire(s) du cinéma
—“In any case you’re interested in the work, not in the man or his heart, you said so yourself”—and admits the pain that his closed-off nature causes her. She finally persuades him to join her for a walk, and he speaks the film’s last words: “Oh, I’m suffocating.”

Miéville’s film is a touching yet unsparing portrait of a difficult yet deeply dedicated couple. Miéville did not hesitate to dramatize the stresses of her relationship with Godard and to suggest what each of them put up with from the other (Clément’s inconsequential dalliance with the hotel pianist mirroring Godard’s own infatuations).
Nous sommes tous encore ici
is not indulgent of either of them, and Miéville’s intimately fictionalized yet meticulously naturalistic view of a private life so close to her own—and Godard’s willingness to participate in its public revelation—is as much a tribute to their mutual devotion as to their devotion to the cinema.

M
EANWHILE
, G
ODARD PURSUED
his relationship with Allaux and tried to make a film that would keep them closely connected through work. After the Strasbourg screening, Allaux went to New York. There, she stayed with Gill Holland, an assistant in the French Film Office as well as a freelance publicist who was also beginning his career as an independent producer. Godard called her at Holland’s apartment every day. As a result, the two men spoke often by phone and with increasing familiarity.
¹⁶
Holland did some work for Cinema Parallel, the distribution company founded by the filmmaker Rob Tregenza, which had released
Hélas pour moi
and
JLG/JLG
in the United States, and to which Godard now offered American distribution rights to
For Ever Mozart
.
In July, Godard flew Tregenza to Paris to see the film along with Piers Handling of the Toronto Film Festival. Handling immediately offered to premiere the film at Toronto, but Godard and Tregenza would not commit before hearing from the New York Film Festival. However, when the New York festival committee turned
For Ever Mozart
down, Godard settled for Toronto.
¹⁷

Handling invited Allaux to Toronto as well, on Holland’s advice, in order to ensure that Godard would show up at the festival along with the film. Handling also asked Godard to program for the festival a North American independent film of his choice. Having heard Handling and Allaux praise Tregenza’s first film,
Talking to Strangers
, from 1988, Godard watched a tape of it and decided to present it in Toronto. Moreover, when Allaux expressed the wish to act in Tregenza’s forthcoming film, Godard agreed to coproduce it with Holland.

The Toronto festival, which was held in September 1996, proved quite eventful. In addition to presenting
For Ever Mozart
and
Talking to Strangers
, Godard showed the next, penultimate, installment of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
. His written agreement with the festival management stipulated that he be provided with a tennis court and a tennis “professor” to play with him.
¹⁸
A dinner was held in Godard’s honor, during which he got up claiming to go to the bathroom and never returned. Later that night, he joined Holland at the hotel bar, where they drank beer and played pool until 1:00
AM
.

At the festival, he discussed with Holland the practical side of producing Tregenza’s next film (called
Springfield
): officially, Godard considered his $100,000 investment a “pre-buy”—a purchase of distribution rights prior to production—but he did not want his name attached to the production of the project, saying, as Holland later recalled: “Anne-Marie would kill me.”
¹⁹
But to raise the project’s profile, Godard agreed to play a role. He also discussed an idea for the end of the last episode of
Histoire(s) du cinéma
in New York City, in which Tregenza would operate the video camera for a single long take in which he would film Godard meeting Allaux and Holland in a bar.

Tregenza, Allaux, and Holland were Godard’s closest connection to a younger generation of filmmakers; though he invested a great deal of time, money, and emotion in them, these relations foundered on the most unyielding of obstacles: an unreciprocated obsession and the increasingly frantic attempts to gratify it.

After the Toronto festival, Allaux and Holland returned to New York and Godard to Rolle. He frequently faxed the three, referring to Allaux as “ourson” (bear-cub) or punningly as the “bear foot contessa.” (Her American friends called her “Bér,” pronounced, New York-style, “Bear.”) Godard planned to come to New York on September 21 for lunch with Holland and Allaux, but postponed it due to illness. He also cancelled a second New York
lunch date, because he and Miéville left for a Greek island on September 25. On October 7, back in Rolle, Godard invited Tregenza to visit him and finalize the plans for the coproduction of
Springfield
. Meanwhile, he was nurturing plans for another film with Allaux.

In mid-1996, the book publisher Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, who also published the film magazine
Trafic
(founded by Serge Daney), sent Godard an advance copy of a yet-unpublished first novel by a twenty-nine-year-old author, Marie Darrieussecq, that his publishing company, P.O.L., would be bringing out. The novel,
Truismes
(a play on words:
truism
, and
truie
, a sow), is the story of a young woman who works in the perfume industry and occasionally turns tricks, and who is transformed into a sow.
²⁰
In September, Godard bought film rights to
Truismes
.
²¹
When Darrieussecq spoke with Godard about the book, she sensed that he was interested in it because he “was in a period, visibly, where his cinematographic ideas revolved around the body, in particular around the female body.”
²²
Intending the part for Allaux, he wrote to Gill Holland for help finding a “comic/strip artist for numerised [i.e., digital] shots,”
²³
and asked Tregenza for information about high-definition computer animation. He abandoned the film, however, because it seemed too expensive to make.
Truismes
unexpectedly became one of the major publishing events and bestsellers of 1996 in France; Godard tried to resell the rights but without success, and his option expired.

His connection with Otchakovsky-Laurens, however, continued. Their relationship dated back to 1993 when Godard had called him and expressed a desire to make a book based on
Hélas pour moi
. The publisher was willing, but Godard did not pursue the project. But after making
For Ever Mozart
, he contacted Otchakovsky-Laurens again to say that he now wanted to create a book of “sentences” from that film and to do the same for other works of his.
²⁴
The publisher prepared a transcript of
For Ever Mozart
, and Godard removed all descriptions and stage directions, “everything except what is said in the film.” Then he rearranged the spoken text in a process which Otchakovsky-Laurens described as “an authentic work of versification.” The result did not resemble a published script; the sentences, broken into short, unpunctuated lines, without attribution to characters, indeed resemble poetry. Godard expressed his satisfaction with the result, declaring, “These are sounds and phrases which correspond to a type of diction, my own.”
²⁵
The genre under which the book is listed is also Godard’s own—“phrases,” that is, sentences—although many of the book’s phrases, or sentences, were not his own: the book features a list of sixteen cited authors, including Georges Bernanos, Marguerite Duras, James Agee, and André Bazin.