REDOUTABLE (GODARD MON AMOUR): The Emperor With No Clothes

If you saw last year’s Oscar nominated documentary Faces Places, you’ll know that now in his old age, Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard has effectively pushed away all those close to him and attempted to undermine any acts of kindness afforded to him through the medium of film. Michel Hazanavicius’ playful biopic Redoutable, retitled Godard Mon Amour in the US, aims to depict the moment his personality changed for the worse – largely over the course of his brief marriage to actress Anne Wiazemsky, whom he didn’t formally divorce until 1979, but separated from in 1970.

A Biopic that will be hated by its subject – and is better for it

Godard has labelled the very idea of a biopic about this period in his career as a “stupid, stupid idea”, but the film is no celebration of the challenging avant garde films he was making in the late sixties. Instead, it depicts Godard as a parody of the pretentious arthouse filmmaker, so preoccupied with making grandiose political statements and works that disregard cinematic conventions he alienates those close to him, and fails to rekindle the interest of the audiences he claims these films were made for in the first place.

It’s a portrayal of a cinematic icon finding himself becoming the butt of the joke – and in Hazanavicius’ hands, Godard’s path towards cultural irrelevance is not entirely dissimilar to that of Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge character. Cinephiles may detest the film for that reason, but the end result is a hilarious cringe comedy that’s funny precisely because it exposes the revered filmmaker as being an emperor with no clothes.

Louis Garrel stars as Godard, who we are introduced to during the making of his 1967 film La Chiniose, the most overtly political film he had made to date – and one that completely baffled audiences, with its Maoist doctrines feeling somewhat alien prior to the events of May 1968 that brought hard-left rhetoric into the mainstream. Godard has just married his recurrent actress Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Martin), and believes that the film they’re making together will be a revolutionary cultural moment throughout the world, and that Chinese audiences will in particular love this bold new piece of work.

After a meeting with the Chinese embassy, Godard is disheartened to find that they unanimously thought the film was a “piece of shit” and that he had no bearing on the realities of Chinese politics. He becomes disillusioned, until the events of May 1968 and the promise of another revolution inspires him to make a film that captures the turbulent political moment.

Heading out to join the mass protests on the streets of Paris, he finds that the students and working class people he aims to inspire want him to return to the style of his earlier films, while his attempts to join in the political conversation reveal a shallow, confused line of thinking. In his attempts to be taken seriously, he finds his marriage slipping through his fingers, alongside the love and respect afforded to him by friends and associates.

Hazanavicius and Godard – more alike than you’d think?

Hazanavicius’ debut film, 1993’s La Classe Americaine, paid tribute to classic works of cinema by crafting an entire new narrative feature out of extracts of various beloved films, and his obsession with mimicking the styles of various cinematic movements has remained constant throughout his career. He lovingly pastiched the silent film with his Oscar winning The Artist (the rare Best Picture winner to feel underrated after its initial buzz wore off), but faltered somewhat with 2014’s The Search.

The Search was a failed prestige picture that aimed to document Russia’s invasion of Chechnya that largely felt like a calculated move to follow up a comedic Oscar winner with a more “serious” effort. In many ways, this is why Redoutable feels like the director criticising his own instincts as much as those of Godard – ordinary people want laughs and escapism in their films, the screenplay argues, not works of overtly political cinema.

And Hazanavicius recaptures the joie de vivre of his earlier works in the sheer stylistic playfulness, that contrasts the subject (Godard at the beginning of his political, experimental reawakening) with the simple aesthetic pleasures of the French New Wave. The director’s regular cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman manages to effortlessly recreate the visual tics of an early Godard movie in the same way that he managed to replicate the basic joys of a silent film in an earlier collaboration with Hazanavicius.

In true Godard style, the director does frequently break the fourth wall for the purpose of gags; getting Garrel to say that only a bad actor would read an extensive monologue about how bad actors are, or having his two main actors appear naked for a conversation on the purposefulness of nudity in cinema. But these fourth wall breaks detract from the more effective character comedy elsewhere, with Godard’s life being depicted as somewhere between tragicomedy and slapstick. He remains the butt of the joke throughout though – as his head gets further up his own backside, he relies more on provocative statements he himself doesn’t seem to understand.

The sight of a grown man trying to explain an appalled room of student protestors why “Jews are the new Nazis” sees the cringe factor grow to proportions not seen since the heydays of Ricky Gervais’ David Brent character. In a film mocking the idea of Godard’s attempts at political statements, this scene maintains a sharp satirical bite due to the sad reality that his deluded arguments are still parroted by a small handful of deluded individuals on the left of politics to this day.

Godard’s portrayal as a comedic oaf may be slightly different to his real world persona, but its still effective thanks to Garrel’s lead performance. He shows not just considerable comic timing, but also the ability to effectively mimic the filmmaker’s own speech patterns and vocal tics – you don’t want to look away from the screen, even if you don’t want to spend a minute longer with this insufferable character. Stacy Martin is also effective as Redoubtable’s audience surrogate, blossoming from being a comedic foil to the most prominent voice of reason. The film deviates from reality in manners best left unspoiled, but her anguish remains believable, not to mention empathetic, throughout.

Redoubtable: Conclusion

Hazanavicius may have invited the ire of Godard, but he’s effectively bounced back after his post-Oscar lull. Redoutable is an irreverent take on the biopic that gleefully flips the bird at its subject, and takes delight in making him conform to a conventional narrative of the type he grew to detest.

He’s an unlikeable character for a plethora of reasons – but spending time in his company leads to some of the finest moments of cringe comedy in recent memory.

Redoutable is released in the UK on May 11, and is currently on limited release in the US (where it’s retitled Godard Mon Amour, for some reason). All international release dates are here.