What approach would you, as a filmmaker, take if you were to make a film based on the life of Jean-Luc Godard? The Godard, who arrived on the scene with the French New Wave and then went on to cut his own radical path, and still going strong six decades later, stepping even into the world of 3D. Over-awed by his stature, chances are that most filmmakers would treat the subject with quite a lot of respect and even adulation.
But not so, for Michel Hazanavicius, whose latest film Redoubtable , being screened at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in the World Cinema category, is an irreverent take on Godard. That irreverence has to do with the nature of material that he worked with too. The film is based on One Year Later , a memoir written by actor Anne Wiazemsky, who was briefly married to Godard in the 1960s.
The film begins to follow Godard (played by Louis Garrel) in 1967, around the time when he is making La Chinoise , centred on a group of young Maoists in Paris. On the course of making the film, Godard and Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Martin), who acted as one of the revolutionaries, fall in love. But it is not easy being in love with Godard, who is shown to revel in his eccentricities and his ego. He objects to her acting in other films and pour scorn on actors too.
With La Chinoise getting a cold reception, Godard goes to other extreme and dismisses all his past work as trash. Outside, the uprisings of May 1968 in France poses a political challenge for him, as his extreme views are rejected by the young revolutionaries.
That was the year when he and a group of other filmmakers went on to disrupt the Cannes Film Festival, as a mark of solidarity with the protesters in Paris.
Caustic humour
The picture that the film, with its caustic humour, paints of Godard is not of a likeable man. But it is also the picture of a person who is not satisfied with the popular, the ordinary, but always yearning to be as radical as no radical ever was.
Hazanavicius, who made the 2011 Oscar Winner The Artist as a tribute to silent cinema, tries here to pay homage to Godard, with some trademark Godardian touches.
