Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (91 page)

“Through working, rehearsing scenes, and rigorously questioning ourselves about these relationships, it ended up resembling an authentic psychoanalysis,” Roussel recalled. “It was exhilarating and exhausting.”
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But it was also extremely uncomfortable and difficult for Roussel. The situation involved her in a virtual triangle with Godard and Miéville, who was making her own film at the time. “There was him and her, him and me; the three of us, it wasn’t working,” Roussel said.
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And when the shoot began, in January 1984, Godard withdrew his nurturing protection.

As usual, Godard had trouble getting started. This time he was also inhibited by the subject matter, by its grandeur and its depth, and he was unsure of how to approach it.

What I’d like is for the people at IBM—I could tell them: “Look, I’ve got a book by Françoise Dolto on religion and psychoanalysis, I’ve got two characters, Joseph and Mary, I’ve got three Bach cantatas, a book by Heidegger. Make me a program which will arrange all that for me.” But they can’t, and so I’ve got to do it myself and I don’t want to spend twenty years on it!
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By now, it was a given that Godard’s shoots would be difficult and burdened by conflict. He sought such conflict and seemed to find it productive. But in this case, he was struggling less with the individuals than with, so to speak, the angel, with the sanctity and significance of the story.

Again Godard sought to involve his cast and crew in discussions about the film’s subject—which for him was virginity, the intimate relationship between a man and a woman, the birth of a child. He assumed that he could talk at least about lust with his male collaborators and about birth with his female collaborators. But he failed to elicit a dialogue that he found satisfactory and he blamed this failure for his difficulties in making the film—he shot everything repeatedly, doing many more takes than usual, refilming the entire story “four or five times,”
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so that it took seven months to shoot a film that runs only seventy minutes. “I’m messed up by not being able to talk about the soup that we’re making,” Godard said, “not being able to talk about virginity to a boy or a girl, or to a cameraman, implicating him a little… I go back over things twenty times.”
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The crew of four included the cameraman Jean-Bernard Menoud, the sound recordist François Musy, a production manager, and an assistant. Godard frequently convened the crew and actors and then sent them home without having done anything at all. One day, to avoid shooting a scene that had already been set up, by the shore of Lake Geneva, Godard jumped into the water fully clothed. It was a winter day and the crew rescued him at once and hustled him indoors to keep him from freezing. The day’s shoot had come to an end before it started.
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Godard thought that the film’s subject imposed technical requirements that were different in kind, even metaphysically so, from other films, including his own. In recent years he had become careful about composition, but for
Hail Mary
he was singularly meticulous. He replaced framings with “centers,” places in the frame on which to focus: “The only thing I succeeded at doing—which the crew didn’t understand at all, even technically—is that there is no frame… I can’t manage to explain to a camera operator that there’s no frame, that there’s a point to find…”
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He came to feel that the film offered him no “margin of error”—that with a difference of even one millimeter, in camera placement or focus,“the shot was ruined.” He had no patience for the technical talk of technicians. During one daytime shoot, when the sun was bright, the
cameraman, Menoud, talked of requiring an aperture of f/22. Godard recalled telling him: “Listen, you’re 1m70 tall, the sun is much bigger than you, and you want to measure yourself against the sun? All you can do is get down on your knees and wait! But you can’t measure yourself against the sun!”
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This quasimystical quest for an image worthy of the subject made Godard even less confident of what he was doing. Roussel remembered:

I’d see him arrive and say, “OK, we’re not shooting, I don’t know what we can do…” We’d rehearsed the dialogue the night before, so we had the dialogue, we knew it, but he didn’t know what to film. That might happen three or four times in a row… The dialogue was rehearsed, but he simply didn’t see the frame that he wanted, or what he wanted to show, or why this sequence now and not another.
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Godard’s hesitation and reshooting upset the actors. He kept Roussel in a sort of supervised isolation in Nyon, between Rolle and Geneva, where the film was shot. “He picked me up every day by car, and would talk to me,” she later recalled. “He put me in the state of mind for the scene we were going to shoot. It might be gentle, it might be violent. He did not like actors who… had training. He wanted to put me back to the state of acting for the first time.”
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Roussel sensed that Godard not only was trying to inform and condition her for the day’s work but was also trying to strip her of what she had learned in her previous training and experience.

With Roussel, Godard achieved the effect that he desired, which was similar to the effect achieved by Robert Bresson through compelling his nonprofessional actors to retake shots dozens of times. As Roussel understood, Godard removed any trace of theatrical expression from her performance.

This is what Godard wanted. I, on the contrary, wanted to act. It’s because of this film that our relations began to deteriorate. He doesn’t ask. He steals. Twenty times, at the moment of the shoot, he sent us home to bed. As a result, I was so exhausted that I ended up doing what he wanted—which is to say, nothing. When I saw the film, I finally understood what he had been looking for. Without my realizing it, Godard had filmed me exactly as I had seemed to him two years earlier.
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By “stealing,” Godard had transformed her back into what she was at the time of
Passion:
a dancer who had never acted, a virgin before the camera.

I
N ITS OUTLINE
,
Hail Mary
consisted largely, at least for its first half, of a fairly literal modernization of the New Testament story of Mary and
Joseph—though with a comic tone that seems inimical to the intense earnestness that Godard brought to its visual aspect. Mary Magdalen, played by Juliette Binoche (a newcomer who, when Godard cast her, was working as a package wrapper in a home furnishings store), confronts Joseph in a café over a beer and suggests that they get married; Joseph refuses, claiming, “People say that a man enters into a woman…”—suggesting, with his powerful ellipsis, that he has been entered, albeit spiritually, by Mary, the Madonna. Mary works in her father’s gas station and plays basketball for a local women’s team. Joseph, a taxi driver, has been with Mary for two years; in this time she has not let him touch or even kiss her.

The angel Gabriel arrives with his news via airplane, in a majestic evening shot of high-contrast shadows, accompanied by the soaring strains of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto. He is accompanied at the Annunciation by a cherubic yet solemn little girl who defends him against crabby businessmen at the airport and makes sure that he gets his lines right. A dark-jawed man with a glowering gaze and a hulking mien, Gabriel hails Joseph’s cab and gives him five hundred dollars to take him to Mary’s father’s service station. There, the angel makes his stunning declaration: Mary comes over to the cab, and Gabriel tells her that she will have a child. Joseph asks who the father is; Gabriel tells him, “Not you.”

Mary goes to her elderly family doctor, who ridicules her assertion that she is a pregnant virgin. But when he examines her he is compelled to accept the evidence: “It’s true that it’s true.”

The story of Mary and Joseph is intercut with another religious story, that of a young professor who has been exiled from his native Czechoslovakia for his religious teachings. The man, who remains unnamed, propounds a theory of intelligent design to his students, suggesting that it is highly improbable that life evolved naturally, and far more likely that “it was willed.” He declares (in a text from the English scientist Sir Fred Hoyle) that life did not develop spontaneously on Earth but came from outer space, and tells his students: “You want to know what an extraterrestrial looks like? Look in the mirror.” (He has an affair with a woman in his class before leaving her to return home to see his wife and child.)

To this point, the story of Mary and Joseph updates the classic theme with enough wit to place the events at human scale and avoid the bathos of devotional kitsch. But after Mary’s virgin pregnancy is revealed to Joseph, the story takes a profound, disturbing turn that bears the mark of Godard’s deepest, most intimate concerns.

Joseph assumes that while Mary has been rejecting his approaches, she has been sleeping with another man. He nonetheless agrees to marry Mary but asks that she at least let him see her body before the marriage, once, even
if he cannot touch it. Mary accepts Joseph’s request and, in a tense, solemn scene, undresses from the waist down and stands before him to teach him how to say and to gesture “I love you.” Joseph must learn to say this serenely and without insistence, to give love, a special, holy love, without demands; his outstretched hand does not touch Mary. When Joseph’s gesture is, at first, too aggressive, the angel Gabriel appears in the room to grab him by the throat, hold him down, and compel his submission: “Because! Because it’s the law! Get it?” Joseph submits—“Yes, I will sacrifice myself”—but Gabriel will not hear of sacrifice: “What kind of asshole are you? Taboo eliminates sacrifice!” Godard mocks Joseph’s common, self-centered, utterly normal lust, if not the lesson that he will learn in its stead: Joseph will not be sacrificed but rather saved by love.

It is Mary, however, who is sacrificed: later, when she is alone, Godard depicts her writhing naked on her bed, tormented by forbidden sexuality—and by God’s possession of her, a possession that, though not physical, is utterly sexual. She convulses in a ferocious agony which joins orgasmic ecstasy to violent resistance. Godard filmed these scenes with Roussel by himself, with no crew present. In the editing, he added to the scene Mary’s voice-over recitation of a text by Antonin Artaud: “God is a jerk and a coward who doesn’t want to fight, and who counts only on sex, that is, on the calm of the heart, to exist… God is a vampire… he profited from my pain.”
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The text, joined to the images, alludes with a perverse exaltation to the identification of Godard with God: Godard filmed Mary’s erotic battle under the power of God by means of filming Roussel herself enduring a similar agony under Godard’s influence.

The film concludes with the young Jesus, a dark, impish, and brilliantly inventive child, dashing off to take care of “his father’s affairs.” Mary, greeted by Gabriel’s gruffly sardonic “Hail, Mary,” responds, “I am of the Virgin, and I wanted nothing to do with this being. I marked the soul that helped me, that’s all”—Godard’s moving tribute to the enduring mark left by Roussel on the soul who helped her, himself.

I
N KEEPING WITH
Godard’s intentions, the images of nature and the quality of light in
Hail Mary
have an appropriately metaphysical splendor, which reflects the difficulty of their creation. Yet the price in personal struggle and cinematic doubt was very high, and Godard acknowledged that he had been tempted to stop the shoot and reimburse Alain Sarde, his coproducer. He claimed that kept going only for the sake of Anne-Marie Miéville, who was making a short film,
Le Livre de Marie (The Book of Mary)
, that would be released together with
Hail Mary
.
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Miéville’s film is a graceful yet painful melodrama of a girl’s effort to
cope with her parents’ separation. As in her first short film,
How Can I Love
, Miéville deftly condenses a long period of time into a brief and efficient narrative framework.
The Book of Mary
covers the period from the parents’ decision to divorce, through Mary’s comings and goings between her home and her father’s new apartment, to the first time she faces the reality of her mother (Auroré Clement, whose wavy blonde hair and angular features resemble Miéville’s own) going out on a date with another man. Mary, a serious yet whimsical girl, travels with a doll yet is learning geometry in school—her father, Paul (Bruno Crémer), who wears Godard-like sunglasses indoors, helps her with it. She speaks to her school friends of her parents’ divorce. Then, returning home, she listens to music very loudly—Mahler—and dances with an intensely sincere exuberance that ends with her mimed collapse. (The dance is reminiscent of the naked antic ballet of Miéville’s daughter in
Six fois deux
.)

Miéville’s film has the ring of intimate confession. She films the characters with a naturalistic simplicity that avoids the grandiosity of myth. Their dialogue is heartfelt, direct, true.
The Book of Mary
presents the material and emotional reality of a modern family, in sharp contrast to Godard’s film, which subjects the family to mythopoetic and philosophical abstraction—and to a tragic pain expressed with an exaltation approaching that of the greatest classical art.

I
N MAY 1984
, Godard took a break from the shoot of
Hail Mary
, which had begun in January, to attend the Cannes festival. The shoot was already overlong and over budget, and Godard, who was coproducing the film, bore financial responsibility for the overages. Even before the filming of
Hail Mary
had started, Alain Sarde had proposed to Godard an avowedly commercial project on a neo-noir theme, to be called
Détective (Detective)
.
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Now, Godard needed it, and at Cannes he helped Sarde to get it under way and to recruit its stars, Claude Brasseur and Nathalie Baye.
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