I noted a few days ago that I saw Éloge de l’amour (2001), also known as In Praise of Love, at BAM Rose Cinemas.
What is incredible about this latest film by Jean-Luc Godard, the granddaddy of French and now American cinema, is that it completely captures the difficulty of knowing where we stand in history’s great unfolding. Godard eloquently examines how we live our lives in modern cities (e.g. Paris) only to consistently misunderstand our place in history, how we got her, and where we are going. We go day-by-day, waiting for the next catastrophe or the next war and, in the interim, try to love and be faithful and hopeful.
Godard’s project is one of disorientation — he shows us our frailties and how we rattle around from one thing to the next with expectations that rarely get fulfilled. In the movie, a French director is eager to make a film about the three stages of life: youth, adulthood, and seniorhood. What he makes clear, through moving the film backwards in time, is that only adulthood really counts and that the rest are only preludes to non-existence.
I took slight umbrance at his silly anti-Americanism that reads like 60s agitprop. But really, he’s only remarking about how the rest of the world sees the U.S. — removed from history, blundering onward, essentially just, and in a blind way that the rest of the world strongly desires.