Eloge de l'amour

The wilful difficulty of Godard lost him his English audience with 1987's King Lear. Though hardly a conventional narrative - passages of sombre grandeur vie with sequences of irritating obscurity - this offers evidence of a desire to communicate, which may recommend it to a new audience. Autobiography appears to play a part. In Lear he cast a director (Carax) to play Edgar - a name given to the director (Putzulu) at the centre of Eloge. To summarise: in the first half (shot memorably in b/w), Edgar muses in voiceover about a project he wishes to make (a play, a movie or an opera); three couples are profiled, as is the young actress he hopes to cast. The second half, in colour-drenched DV, flashes back two years to describe a conflict between a Hollywood producer and an elderly couple whose Resistance story he wants to film; their granddaughter (Camp) is the young actress. How these parts comment on each other is unclear. What is clear is that Godard's obsessions (anti-globalisation, the role of art and cinema in life, etc) are as passionately held as ever, though their precise meaning remains elusive.