Louis Garrel is well-cast as French New Wave icon and legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in this film by Michel Hazanavicius. Godard Mon Amour is based on the 2015 autobiographical novel Un An Après by the late Anne Wiazemsky, Godard's wife and muse during the last half of the 1960s, and it covers the period when Godard moved into more aggressively political subjects and struggled to challenge the traditional conventions of filmmaking with a meaningful revolutionary alternative. But the film is less about the artist than the man himself as seen from the perspective of his dewy, bubbly young wife (Stacy Martin), a woman almost 20 years his junior. Godard was something of a conundrum: a self-conscious cinematic genius who cut ties with old friends for failing to be revolutionary, a political filmmaker whose treatment of women on screen ranged from the admirable to the exploitative, and an outsider in France who embraced oppressed people around the world yet has a history of troubling anti-Semitic remarks. Hazanavicius (who directed the Oscar-winning The Artist) is neither a deep thinker nor a cinematic firebrand and he fails to connect with Godard's struggle or even his art, but he is adept at parody and pastiche and his style here is closer to the whimsy and playfulness of Francois Truffaut, finding humor in Godard's contradictions and his desperation to be taken seriously by the young students leading the May 1968 protests. Ultimately, this is a pleasingly irreverent portrait of the cinematic legend. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)
Godard Mon Amour
Cohen, 107 min., in French w/English subtitles, R, DVD: $25.99, Blu-ray: $30.99 Volume 33, Issue 6
Godard Mon Amour
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