The French word for turkey is le dindon. With this in mind, it's fair to say that French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard's latest movie, In Praise of Love (Éloge de l'Amour), is basically fricassée du dindon -- and none too tasty, either. Snoots will no doubt rally to its cause, trotting out such threadbare standbys as "masterpiece" and "triumph," and all that malarkey, but rarely does an established filmmaker so ardently waste viewers' time with a gobbler like this. Given Godard's four decades of cinematic and sociological experimentation -- from Breathless and Weekend to King Lear and For Ever Mozart -- it's pretty shocking that this thing isn't even artsy. Barring a few brief moments of instantaneously fizzling inspiration, it's merely fartsy.
Well, fine. Under the reasonable assumption that Godard has set out to make a fartsy movie, let's assess his successes theretoward. There are random shots of cows, horses, and French people. There are stretches of absurdly pretentious dialogue edited over awkward angles or black interstitials, so that one has no idea who is talking or why. Probably filched from a bum poet's scribble pad, said dialogue involves references to history being replaced by technology, to landscapes seeming new only in comparison to previously known landscapes, to -- no joke, deep-thinkers -- the collapse of the gaze. Somehow, it's all to do with nostalgia and reckoning, and indeed, the director seems quite confident in his jumbled mess, but the very element of fruity incomprehensibility that makes dadaism (or life itself) so appealing makes this project aggressively tedious.
If Godard is trying to say something here -- actually, he seems much more interested in obliterating his statements in mid-delivery -- it's mostly to do with memory, presumably his own spluttering sense thereof. As uppity, thirtyish know-it-all Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) struggles to create the titular Éloge de l'Amour, a cinematic magnum opus about the four stages of a love affair -- those'd be hooking up, doing it, dashing off, and hooking up again -- Godard grants himself license to explore at length the unrelated notion that memory may be of little use in reclaiming one's life. Nifty in theory, but all that's really going on is rusty cultural and philosophical regurgitation, via Edgar's pretty actors Eglantine (Audrey Klebaner) and Perceval (Jeremy Lippman), via his ever-failing conquest, Elle (Cécile Camp), via anyone who manages to avoid falling out of the remarkably amateurish frames of cinematographers Christophe Pollock and Julien Hirsch.
Since the thematic content of In Praise of Love is so irritatingly obtuse, it would have been downright decent of Godard to sedate us with some suitably high-minded visuals during our 98 minutes of punishment. No such luck. The first 60 percent or so is shot clumsily on black-and-white film that makes Paris look mostly like a sad little toilet, while the remainder -- taking place two years earlier in the countryside -- is shot on digital video that looks like puke. If nothing else, Godard has effectively ended any debate about the value of one cinematic medium over another; slop knows no technical boundaries.
