Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (89 page)

Adjani, however, was not an amateur actress. Godard’s difficulties with her began before the camera rolled in January 1983. He wanted her to appear without makeup. Adjani not only refused, she brought her own personal makeup artist to work with her. She insisted that Godard shoot copious test footage, and she also placed many restrictions on what could be shot—in particular, concerning nude scenes, of which Godard had planned many.

The first sequence to be shot was that of the bank robbery, when Carmen and Joseph meet. During the shoot, all the brewing sources of tension came out into the open. Adjani complained to one journalist that Godard wouldn’t let her wear makeup; to another, about the small camera that reminded her of home movies; according to Anne-Marie Miéville, who was present, Adjani said that Coutard “was a misogynist and didn’t know how to photograph women.”
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The Saturday after the first week of the shoot, in which little real work was done, Adjani called Alain Sarde in tears to tell him that she would not continue.

The recasting started at once. The agent Myriam Bru sent Godard an inexperienced twenty-year-old actress from the Netherlands who had arrived in France just two years earlier and was working as an au pair. The young woman, Maruschka Detmers, came for an audition and left a head shot. Godard asked her to come to his office again to do a screen test on videotape. She played a scene with Jacques Bonnaffé in which she had to grab him by the arm and speak sharply to him. Her instinctive reaction, she said, was very violent, and, she said, “I yelled at him anything that came into my head.”
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Godard told her point-blank that he didn’t think that she could do the part, to which she responded by calling him “mean.”
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That night, he called and asked her to sign a contract. He later said that Detmers was the only actress beside Adjani “who corresponded with the idea that we had of the character. Brunette, wild. She seemed to have a vigor, a natural autonomy in the scenes that we rehearsed. She didn’t interpret.”
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Yet no sooner did he cast Detmers than he was, as usual, disappointed: “And then afterwards, you discover the perversity: immediately, interpretation.”
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Godard continued to work with and against actors in order to keep them from identifying psychologically with their characters. He favored precise physical behavior, exact recitation of texts, and a relation to action that was based on knowledge and experience rather than emotional extrapolation.

Time was limited, however. Detmers had been called in to step into Adjani’s role on short notice, and she could not go through the kind of complex training that Myriem Roussel had had. Instead, Godard told Detmers and Bonnaffé to listen to the Beethoven quartet recordings that he gave them, and to visit the Rodin Museum in Paris. Detmers (according to Godard) did not go to the museum and did not bother to listen to the music, either. Bonnaffé—to whom Godard had said, “Don’t obey, I detest that”—obeyed, and paid the price, as he later recalled:

Once I had listened to the Beethoven, he was able to come yell at me because I didn’t know how to listen and it hadn’t served any purpose. He said: “But it’s completely crazy, we’ve been shooting together for three weeks and you haven’t yet figured out that you are the viola, not the solo, the viola. Don’t listen, listen to nothing, don’t listen anymore.”
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For Detmers the shoot went worse: “Godard told us, ‘If you listen to the music, you will understand what you have to do, let yourself get carried away.’ When we didn’t understand, he said that he had made a mistake, that he shouldn’t have made the film.”
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Godard’s instructions to her had nothing to do with what she had learned in acting class. “For example, for the scene in the bank, I had asked him whether Carmen was angry, or vulnerable or something else. He was shocked. He answered, ‘What kind of words are these, I don’t know them, maybe she is vulnerable, I wouldn’t know, you have to follow the movements of the music, that’s all.’” In the end, Detmers found herself unsure of what he wanted: “The only fixed point of reference I had,” she said, “was my contract.”
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Miéville, however, noticed that Godard directed his actors more specifically and more precisely than before, and attributed this to their inexperience and their theatrical training—which his meticulous instructions were intended to counteract. As Bonnaffé, a skilled theater actor, remembered: “If we tried to understand, to analyze our character’s psychology, Godard got angry, he stopped us at once. He said that destroyed expression, which should remain intuitive and free. We lived in a climate of tension. Wanting us to share his concerns, his creative anxieties, he left us on the tightrope.”
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In the film, though, Godard joined his actors on their tightrope. After making the film, he recalled, “Making a film, for me, is nebulous. It’s painful. Each time it’s like the creation of the world.”
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Now Godard conveyed his anxieties directly: he played them out on-screen, in performance. He compared his performance to that of the string quartet in terms of the layer of behind-the-scenes reality that it added to the film: “Just as we see the musicians, so the one who is inventing the story takes part in the story.”
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The film begins with Godard—“Uncle Jean”—in a hospital; he is not sick, but is using it as a sort of nonwriter’s retreat during his enforced exile from the cinema. In his role, Godard comically elevates his suffering to tragic proportions, as, for instance, in a parody of his struggles with Jean-Pierre Beauviala to produce a camera of his own. Uncle Jean sits in his hospital bed, holding on his shoulder a boom box that he calls his new “camera,” which he claims to have built together with the kitchen staff. This “camera” emits a few tinny notes pecked out from all registers of a frail old piano, a haphazard rendition of the children’s song “Au Clair de la Lune”—the first line of which continues, “mon ami Pierrot.” The song, with its reference to Godard’s film from 1965, invokes the buried notion of Carmen as a surrogate for Anna Karina.

Hired by the criminals to make a film that will serve as a front for their robbery scheme, Uncle Jean wanders through the story in anticipation of his return to glory. But his was not the only self-abasement that Godard filmed; if, in general, he was hard on his actors, he required of Detmers a sacrificial degree of self-abnegation. When he had put Isabelle Huppert into sexually demanding situations in
Sauve qui peut
, she was an experienced young actress consciously taking on the sort of challenge that would define her career. Detmers, however, was appearing in her first film and was hardly in a position to defend herself. She was called upon to expose her body and to unleash a carnal energy, a physical rage, and an emotional cruelty that Godard took to be in her nature. Detmers and Bonnaffé were remarkably pliant and uninhibited in the face of Godard’s difficult demands—as when, while handcuffed to Joseph, Carmen is pulled by him into the men’s room of a roadside gas station/convenience store, and has to urinate, while still captive, by sitting on a men’s urinal, or when Joseph attempts to rape Carmen in the shower.

Detmers performed several intense nude scenes with Bonnaffé, including a close-up of her pubic area that is reminiscent, in its directness, of Courbet’s painting
The Creation of the World
. Godard made Carmen’s carnality the focus of the character, and throughout the film, both her erotic power and her vulnerability govern the action. Indeed, despite the sexual degradation to which Detmers submitted during the shoot, the character of Carmen is in subjection not to men but to sex itself, a blind destructive force which brings down the men under her influence—exactly as suggested by the line that inspired Godard, “If I love you, that’s the end of you.” Ultimately, it does her in as well.

Even Carmen’s dealings with her Uncle Jean are rife with lust. In the film’s first scene, Carmen visits him in the hospital to ask whether he would lend her his seaside apartment so that she and some friends could make a film there. He demands a kiss from her, then walks behind her and—as Godard had done with
Schygulla in the video sketch for
Passion
—lasciviously caresses her lips with his fingers, which she disgustedly rebuffs.

Indeed,
First Name: Carmen
deepens the psychodrama of incest Godard had been staging since the mid-1970s and paves the way for his next film, the long-delayed story about fathers and daughters. While Carmen and Joseph hide out in Uncle Jean’s empty seaside apartment—Godard’s own apartment in Trouville—she indicates the nature of her relations with her uncle. Reminiscing about the time she spent there when she was young, she gestures in one direction and tells Joseph, “That was his room,” then after a pause, repeats, more softly, “His room.”

Godard acknowledged that he could not have made such an eroticized film if the role of Carmen had been played by Adjani rather than Detmers, “because with Adjani we wouldn’t have been able to do anything, she would have refused to do three-quarters of there things. They’re nothing extraordinary, but stars are like heads of state, they do certain things, they don’t do others.”
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Detmers was not a star; she did things on-camera that more established performers might have resisted; and as a result, she endured, in the course of the shoot, “vulnerability, shame, paralysis.”
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Cavalier treatment of the actors and the crew was not uncommon during the shoot. Christophe Odent, who played the head of the band of criminals, described Godard’s behavior toward him: “He constantly calls meetings where he asks you to say why you are bad.”
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Bonnaffé recalled that, during the shoot, Godard took refuge in a neighboring café and wrote “a tract, which he distributed, in the style of
J’accuse:
‘the technicians do what I ask them but bring nothing of their own, the actors act, but like cabinet ministers, the producer criticizes but doesn’t have a word to say about how things could be made better.’”
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Godard also complained about Coutard much as he complained about Detmers: “I had asked him to go see Rodin’s sculptures… I thought it was good for the film, for the body, and then I thought that if you’re being paid nine thousand francs per week, maybe you could… He didn’t go.”
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For his part, Coutard found Godard disturbingly vague about his wishes: “On
First Name: Carmen
we only worked with natural light, but that wasn’t something Jean-Luc expressed clearly from the outset. He wasn’t very conscious of what he wanted. We only understood as we made the film.”
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This was the last film the two made together.

Even the camera Godard wanted to use for the film, the small Aàäton that he had commissioned, was a source of conflict. Though Godard had originally meant it to be no quieter than is needed to film dialogue scenes in the street, he had Beauviala modify it to run still more quietly to film intimate conversations in interior spaces. It was a tall order on a short schedule, and
despite Beauviala’s efforts, the camera did not work as Godard or Coutard had hoped. Godard reacted angrily,
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used Beauviala’s camera for only a few shots, and then switched to a conventional-sized Arriflex.

Godard later accepted an invitation from
Cahiers du cinéma
to join Beauviala and several other film professionals to talk out the problem in a roundtable discussion published as “Genesis of a Camera.” The discussion was heated.
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The two protagonists vigorously debated the terms of the commission for the camera, the uses for which it was designed, the handling of it by Godard and his crew. Throughout, Godard repeatedly lamented his inability to bring about the desired relations with his associates—“the phenomenon of the troupe, of the family.”
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Beauviala recalled the roundtable discussion as cathartic: “We were like an old couple who needed to have a good shouting match.”
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This dénouement seemed, to him, typical of his years of working with Godard. “He needs drama; he needs discord; he needs provocation; he needs conflict; he needs difficulties; he needs to yell at people—he needs to be unhappy.”
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The shoot ended on a sour note. As Bonnaffé recalled, “One day, [Godard] said, ‘You’re doing something other than making the film, and the technicians don’t understand it. We’re not managing to do anything. Goodbye.’ That’s how he announced the end of the shoot to us.”
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Yet the bitterness, the disillusionment, the regret, the self-loathing, self-revelation, and self-pity that had burst forth in Godard’s conduct on the set were no mere caprice; they were the scathing emotional center of
First Name: Carmen
, and as such they were the stuff of art.

G
UIDED BY THE
film’s two dramatic axes—the director’s self-pitying view as a rejected filmmaker and a debilitated sinner, and the destructive power of a woman unleashed on the unfortunate man who loves her—Godard filmed nature and art, the ocean from the Normandy coast and the string quartet in rehearsal, with daring and originality. In particular, his filming of the string quartet, materializing the music and evoking its creation as a blend of emotion, sport, and labor, arguably comprise the most revelatory depiction of musical performance in the history of cinema.