2001 Toronto International Film Festival-Part 4
Films by Godard, Cox, Imamura and others
By David Walsh
8 October 2001

Veteran French director Jean-Luc Godard's Eloge de l'amour (Eulogy of
Love) is a cold and uninvolving work and largely incoherent. Largely,
but not entirely. What comes though the irritating collage of
disjointed moments are self-pity, demoralization and French (or
European) chauvinism.

In the first part of the film, shot in black and white in present-day
Paris, a film director, Edgar, is attempting to put some project
together. He is also searching for a woman he knows. He finds her,
but can't convince her to join him. There are comments on art, aging,
memory, love. There are references to Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil.

The second part of the film, which takes place two years earlier and
is shot in color, concerns a couple who fought in the Resistance
during World War II and who are now selling their story to Hollywood.
We also witness the initial encounter of Edgar and the woman.

This is the sort of film that publicists and certain critics are apt
to describe as "a meditation on love, memory and history." Such glib
phrases enable the commentator to avoid specifying precisely what the
film says about either love, memory or history. I derived almost
nothing from the film except that Godard is at sea, pessimistic about
life and society and feels vaguely sorry for himself. The first part
of the work is simply gloomy, the second dominated by cheap
anti-Americanism ("Spielberg Associates" is purchasing the Resistance
fighters' story; a group of little girls in local costume show up at
the door petitioning to have Matrix dubbed into the Breton language.
Earlier we have been told, the Americans have no memories, so "they
buy others'").

Really, enough is enough. Godard was a leftist for a few years some
decades ago. He was disappointed by the difficulties and abandoned
the political struggle. That was his right. On the basis of his
disenchantment, however, Godard has now taken it upon himself to
judge the human race. Incredibly, someone in the film declares: "It's
not a question of whether man will continue, but whether he has a
right to." Even in this day and age, presumption and self-importance
have their limits! One thinks of the poet Heine's reply to a
similarly empty-headed and philistine "question": "And the fool
expects an answer..."