Godard’s mid-period film, which Richard Brody says he described as his second first film, is a rambling box of tricks and sighs. The tricks are beautiful, the sighs are ugly. The tricks are ugly, the sighs are beautiful. A trick might be the use of slow motion, as Nathalie Baye’s progress on a bicycle through the Swiss countryside is slowed down into a sequence of digital movement, frame by frame, discovering a poetry in the simplest of actions, a trick he repeats at other moments throughout the film. Another trick might be the imposition of the most lyrical music, for a few seconds, propelling the film towards a dreamy romantic level, only to cut the music off before the viewer can get lost in it. Another trick, the ugly tricks, are the turns that seedy men ask Isabelle Huppert to perform as a prostitute. Godard pushes the ugliness towards Centipedal lengths, confronting the viewer. The sighs are the human moments, when the characters who so often feel like marionettes in Godard’s psycho-sexual landscape suddenly step out of character and become real people, with real concerns. Something Baye excels out, inveighing her lost character with a pathos that seems to go against the filmmaker’s grain. Brody’s comments on Huppert’s thoughts on Godard’s direction are great in this regard: “She spoke of Godard’s control of her diction and of her gestures, of his sense that “one must imprison the actor so that his true soul can emerge.” She felt that Godard’s methods brought her closer to herself and, paradoxically, to the character she was embodying, and she found the experience artistically gratifying.” The complexity of the process the actors faced is complemented by the complexity of everything in Sauve Qui Peut: the narrative; the blurred urban/rural division; the mash-up of visual styles; the mash-up of tones. In this sense it feels, as perhaps all Godard’s work feels, like the predicted apex of a modernity which has already passed. His bricolage was ahead of its time, the time came, it went, leaving a film from the future firmly in the past. In this sense it’s a commentary on a world on the eve of the digital. Innocent pleasures of the kind to be found in his earlier films are banished, we are now in the aseptic land of sex, lies and videotape. Identity begins to fracture, the director is Godard, the lead character is called Godard, people’s lives will not flow in straight lines, they will be broken down with slow motion and out-of-synch musical interludes. Emotion no longer comes naturally, it will be constructed in spite of moral indifference.
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