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Pretty Good

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Admirable film.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Edgar is a director trying to pull together a project around the subject of love. While drawing it up the author meets a young woman he once knew very well and he spends time with her again while jumping through the various funding and organisational hoops. In the second part of the film we skip backwards two years to the point where the author originally met the woman. At this point in his life he is representing Hollywood and is in the process of purchasing the rights to the story of the girl's grandparents, who ere in the resistance during the majority of World War II.There's one thing to be said for Godard and that's that you can be fairly confident he isn't going to be directing the next Harry Potter film as this 2001 movie shows he is as difficult and rewarding as he could be. The first half of the film is in black and white, while the second is in blistering digital colour. If my plot summary suggests a total cohesion then forget it – the suggested connection with a romance is more from my summary than the actual film. Instead what we have is free flowing dialogue that covers issues around America, art, love, age, humanity and so on – it is difficult to get into but it is worth trying. The dialogue is rather pretentious and too 'deep' to be natural or realistic but it still engages the brain in a way that kept me interested even if I struggled to get into narrative or characters, or to really agree with much of what was being said. I say it is worth trying but I would suggest that this makes it a weak film by the standards of more linear films and should be seen as more of an experience than a story or 'normal' film.Matching this, the direction is both hypnotic and off-putting. Shots are framed in very arty ways with the characters in shadow, out of focus, out of shot etc for much of the film; the b&w section is crisp and feels older than it is, while the colour section is startling in its intensity. Again all this has the dual effect of coming across as rather pretentious and overly arty but then also being interesting enough and imaginative enough to keep you watching. Of course many audiences will be put off, and rightly so because not even once does this film take a step towards the audience to help us out – instead it pitches its tent and simply says that we can take it or leave it. In my own 'difficult' style, I managed to do both and found the film as frustrating and alienating as I did interesting and involving. The cast are hard to judge because they are rather stilted and cold throughout, but none of them really give anything that could be described as a poor performance.Overall this is a strange film and one that is worth a try and worth sticking at for what it does well. However this is not as simple as it should have been and the film does very little to help the audience keep involved and interested. Visually it is true art-house stuff but yet is also great to look at – starkly beautiful or weirdly colourful; meanwhile the dialogue is unnatural and pretentious but yet still interesting and thoughtful. A strange mix but one that is worth a try.

It's very difficult to see some of Godard's most recent work here in the United States, but what's available confirms in my mind that, as a director, he's still ahead of the game. True, contemporary trends combined with the business of film leave little room in the commercial market for those who work in such a subjective and experimental way - as Godard continually does. But being pushed to the sidelines of commercial cinema does not, in my opinion, automatically mean the artist (in this case, Godard) is any less powerful or innovative. And to my way of thinking, IN PRASE OF LOVE, though difficult at first to penetrate, is a terrifically rich and rewarding experience; as wildly innovative in its own way as the jump cuts were in BREATHLESS over forty years ago. The most ironic thing about Godard's work – all of it – is how his continual exploration of film technique and convention over the last forty plus years has been so thoroughly digested by the mainstream. The kind of non-linear editing that so perplexed many in the 60's is now the basis of modern, Hollywood montage. Music video owes much to what Godard did back then. Fragmenting an action or series of actions in such a way that the result is not an easy, linear flow of time and space, but the visualization of an idea or, more often the case today, an emotion, seems to me an essentially Godardian concept. (Trivialized now, in the way its function serves today's action movies.) The way Godard's technique fragments and folds the past with the present in IN PRAISE OF LOVE, serving, as it does, the very basic conventions of a love story, took my breath away. To me, the film evokes both an intellectual response, and one that is entirely emotional. Left to his own devices, Godard continues to show us that possibilities exist beyond current trends and expectations. His experiments lead the way in cutting edge technique and personal expression. (Indeed, Godard was using tape a long time before the Dogma boys, and I suspect years from now digital tape will in fact be the norm.) So I wouldn't count him our. Not at all. He'll never again be the toast of any new wave, but his influence will always be with us

No one, and I mean NO ONE, who has survived the first freshman all-night bull-session between post-acne cream nudniks who have just prepped for their first quickie quiz in Philosophy & Western Thought is going to buy this film.At least not as profound social commentary.I recommend instead that you unplug your Sony audio recorder -- ever hungry for more moralistic anti-capitalistic, anti-American sound-bytes -- and crank up instead your minds' eye recorder for beautiful images of French art in the 20th Century.The first half of the film recollects time and place of the French New Wave Cinema. No need to pin it down. Let Director Godard just take you on a Senior Citizen's bus tour of the moments you have traveled through already, the monuments you have passed by, and the shadowy mementos of a film era that needs no dusting off, so long as we strongly remember that its work is done.The second half if the film recollects turn-of-the-Century painting, returning over and over to still life, in both straight-forward and tongue-in-cheek ways. The plot overlays a story of compound betrayals, both in the NOW, and in the era that the NOW is trying to mine, and exhaust and corrupt; but for me the message is that France is too sturdy for all that. The shoreline, the fishing boats, the by-ways, could withstand a dozen wars, a hundred invasion of treacherous film-makers, a thousand conveniently forgetful name-dropping intellectuals, and keep on being France.Just don't buy the Philosophy 101, part, OK. Spoken by several characters, centering about a tall, 3/4 beautiful and 1/2 educated woman, crouching down into her inappropriate sports car. Is there anyone more declarative, arrogant, and uninformed than such a human? Anyone quicker to point fingers? Anyone freer of accountability to truth and experience?This film is impossible to enjoy if you keep your rational gears engaged; impossible NOT to enjoy if you let the RIGHT hemisphere of your brain take over. Life is too short not to get it right.

I have seen countless French films. And I will continue to watch Gallic productions but this filmed train wreck has me matching the reviews shown in the critics section. This production is awful and that is stating it mildly. The cinema going public will be forever in the debt of director Jean-Luc Godard. He, along with Trauffaut and others created the groundbreaking French New Wave film movement in the early 1960s starting with ‘Breathless', which is still evident in movies of today. But now he is just a desiccated old man riding on his fading legend, having his own little private in-joke that slaps our heads for being such ignorant rubes, especially Americans for buying other people's memories because we as a nation do not have any. Godard might be irate that Hollywood has taken over the world's cineplexes. But what is the competition? This mish-mash artifice and criticism of art in its different forms just wanders in and out of scenes with various characters that can never be identified or truly identified with unless they have a sourpuss personality. There are pointless pontifications that have no connection to anything resembling a storyline with a historical fact cited to give it some kind of legitimacy. And what was Jean-Luc saying by placing numerous scenes near and by water? Was he saying that mankind was drowning in its own moral morass or was Godard confessing that he had no possible clue how to show this impenetrable story, so he substituted by having the audience ponder the gentle ebb and sometimes clashing waves as a reflection into our own souls. Amazingly, there is one item that does stand out in a positive fashion: the black-and-white cinematography in the first half of the movie. The night and early morning shots with their black recesses, sharpened figures and darkened foreground remind me of Brassaï photographs of the ‘City of Light' before the Second World War. The ambiance evokes that warm feeling toward Paris as Woody Allen does about New York City in ‘Manhatten'. But in the end, cynicism wins out and so Godard uses the writer as a substitute to sum up his viewpoint in an existentialist manner that could have been written by Albert Camus. Jean-Luc should have been more honest like the movie director-character in that other debacle about why the French film industry is in decline, ‘Irma Vep'. `F*** the audience. They will see what I want them to see.' ‘In Praise Of Love' is a perfect example of that edict.