Even After 30 Years, the Film of the Moment
Film Desk
Isabelle Huppert in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Every Man for Him- self”
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Jacques Dutronc and Nathalie Baye in a scene from the film, in which he leaps across a kitchen table and falls on top of her.
Made when he was 28, “Breathless” was the shot heard around the world in 1960. By the time “Every Man for Himself” was released in New York he was 49 and was being positioned as something of an eager comeback kid. By then, as one magazine interviewer assured readers, friends had deserted Mr. Godard and the critics had forgotten him. He had become a “cultural nonperson,” if only of course because mainstream publications hadn’t bothered to keep up with him. Only now, armed with three name actors — Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye and Jacques Dutronc — and a festival-ready movie shot in beautiful, commercially viable 35-millimeter film, could the eternal enfant terrible again be formally accepted.
A new 35-millimeter print of “Every Man for Himself” begins a two-week run at Film Forum Friday and once more it is the film of the moment, if now for different reasons. On Saturday Mr. Godard is being awarded an honorary Oscar that he has said he won’t accept in person. The Oscar, his refusal and accusations of anti-Semitism have unsurprisingly stirred up a minor storm. With few notable exceptions, rational conversations, including about the work itself, have been largely absent, partly because some critics shut down completely when confronted by Mr. Godard, as evident by some of the condescending dismissals that greeted his last, “Film Socialism,” when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
“Every Man for Himself” is more approachable than much of Mr. Godard’s recent work, with its dense layers of sound and image, epigrams and allusions. Organized into sections, “Every Man” includes one segment titled “The Imaginary” which largely involves Denise (Ms. Baye), a young woman who labors in television but has moved to the countryside to work on a new project, perhaps a novel. In doing so, she has pulled away from her lover, the pointedly named Paul Godard (Mr. Dutronc), a filmmaker at the center of the subsequent section, “Fear.” The next, “Commerce,” in turn follows a prostitute, Isabelle (Ms. Huppert).
The women meet when Isabelle responds to an ad that Denise has placed to rent her and Paul’s apartment.
The domestic sphere haunts “Every Man for Himself,” as does the suggestion that relationships between men and women are doomed. Paul lives in a hotel and complains to Denise about the ad for their apartment. She in turn accuses him of wanting a guardian angel, and wanting love to come out of their shared work. He counters that without work love is just “bursts of passion,” an idea that is put into visual terms late in the film when Paul abruptly leaps across a kitchen table and falls on top of Denise, sending them both crashing to the floor. Shown in slow motion, this encounter is pictorially extraordinary, but also intensely bleak because it suggests that without work, this is the only way Paul can express love.
His relationships with his ex-wife (Paule Muret) and daughter (Cecile Tanner, the daughter of the director Alain Tanner) share similar undercurrents of despair and violence. In one of the film’s most shocking scenes Paul is heard in voice-over making salacious comments about his daughter to another unseen man as the camera fixes on her image. Denied a voice, the girl is defenseless against both the vocal and visual assaults. In another episode Paul goes out with his ex and their daughter to celebrate the girl’s birthday, a celebration that opens with the girl reciting an essay about the historic migration of blackbirds from the country to the city and ends badly when Paul tosses his gifts literally in his daughter’s face.
The connection between male sexual violence and filmmaking runs like a thread through “Every Man for Himself.” The central chapters in the film — the imaginary, fear and commerce — could be a distillation of what is demanded of filmmakers to make movies. But these words also cling to the women in the film, who are by turns the subject of male imaginings (as when Paul talks about his daughter), male dread (evident in Paul’s violent outbursts) and male money (as in the scenes of prostitution). Paul is implicated in modes of sexual domination, as when a male hotel worker offers him his body (chasing him like a rabid fan) and when he hires Isabelle for sex. By virtue of being a filmmaker it’s also clear that he himself is a whore.
Whore and john both: in the film’s most notorious scene, Isabelle visits a male client, a businessman, who coordinates a sexual machinelike display that is almost near-comic in its tortuous choreography and depressing for the same reason. Seated behind a desk like an executive, the businessman instructs his male assistant and a naked female prostitute to service him, an order that finds the woman under the desk, her pale naked rump in the middle of the frame and staring out, as it were, at the camera. The businessman might be an executive, a suit, in the lingo of the movie industry, but here he’s also a director. Just as the male hotel worker who clutched so ferociously at Paul said, there’s “nothing better” than a little backside.
A new 35-millimeter print of “Every Man for Himself” begins a two-week run at Film Forum Friday and once more it is the film of the moment, if now for different reasons. On Saturday Mr. Godard is being awarded an honorary Oscar that he has said he won’t accept in person. The Oscar, his refusal and accusations of anti-Semitism have unsurprisingly stirred up a minor storm. With few notable exceptions, rational conversations, including about the work itself, have been largely absent, partly because some critics shut down completely when confronted by Mr. Godard, as evident by some of the condescending dismissals that greeted his last, “Film Socialism,” when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
“Every Man for Himself” is more approachable than much of Mr. Godard’s recent work, with its dense layers of sound and image, epigrams and allusions. Organized into sections, “Every Man” includes one segment titled “The Imaginary” which largely involves Denise (Ms. Baye), a young woman who labors in television but has moved to the countryside to work on a new project, perhaps a novel. In doing so, she has pulled away from her lover, the pointedly named Paul Godard (Mr. Dutronc), a filmmaker at the center of the subsequent section, “Fear.” The next, “Commerce,” in turn follows a prostitute, Isabelle (Ms. Huppert).
The women meet when Isabelle responds to an ad that Denise has placed to rent her and Paul’s apartment.
The domestic sphere haunts “Every Man for Himself,” as does the suggestion that relationships between men and women are doomed. Paul lives in a hotel and complains to Denise about the ad for their apartment. She in turn accuses him of wanting a guardian angel, and wanting love to come out of their shared work. He counters that without work love is just “bursts of passion,” an idea that is put into visual terms late in the film when Paul abruptly leaps across a kitchen table and falls on top of Denise, sending them both crashing to the floor. Shown in slow motion, this encounter is pictorially extraordinary, but also intensely bleak because it suggests that without work, this is the only way Paul can express love.
His relationships with his ex-wife (Paule Muret) and daughter (Cecile Tanner, the daughter of the director Alain Tanner) share similar undercurrents of despair and violence. In one of the film’s most shocking scenes Paul is heard in voice-over making salacious comments about his daughter to another unseen man as the camera fixes on her image. Denied a voice, the girl is defenseless against both the vocal and visual assaults. In another episode Paul goes out with his ex and their daughter to celebrate the girl’s birthday, a celebration that opens with the girl reciting an essay about the historic migration of blackbirds from the country to the city and ends badly when Paul tosses his gifts literally in his daughter’s face.
The connection between male sexual violence and filmmaking runs like a thread through “Every Man for Himself.” The central chapters in the film — the imaginary, fear and commerce — could be a distillation of what is demanded of filmmakers to make movies. But these words also cling to the women in the film, who are by turns the subject of male imaginings (as when Paul talks about his daughter), male dread (evident in Paul’s violent outbursts) and male money (as in the scenes of prostitution). Paul is implicated in modes of sexual domination, as when a male hotel worker offers him his body (chasing him like a rabid fan) and when he hires Isabelle for sex. By virtue of being a filmmaker it’s also clear that he himself is a whore.
Whore and john both: in the film’s most notorious scene, Isabelle visits a male client, a businessman, who coordinates a sexual machinelike display that is almost near-comic in its tortuous choreography and depressing for the same reason. Seated behind a desk like an executive, the businessman instructs his male assistant and a naked female prostitute to service him, an order that finds the woman under the desk, her pale naked rump in the middle of the frame and staring out, as it were, at the camera. The businessman might be an executive, a suit, in the lingo of the movie industry, but here he’s also a director. Just as the male hotel worker who clutched so ferociously at Paul said, there’s “nothing better” than a little backside.
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