Redoubtable

This was a dis­as­ter wait­ing to hap­pen. One of the great icons of Euro­pean cin­e­ma, an artist of sub­lime intel­lec­tu­al rigour who exists in a per­pet­u­al state of cre­ative rein­ven­tion, becomes the sub­ject of a glossy biopic from one of the continent’s crowd-pleas­ing show­men. That inscrutable demigod, Jean-Luc Godard, goes before the lens of Oscar-win­ning recre­ation artist, Michel Haz­anavi­cius, with the actor Louis Gar­rel slip­ping into the suede desert boots and rec­tan­gu­lar shades of the mae­stro him­self. What could pos­si­bly go wrong?

To be hon­est, noth­ing much. But then not too much goes right either. Redoubtable is a hand­some­ly mount­ed tri­fle about JLG’s trans­for­ma­tion from pop­ulist arty hit machine to rev­o­lu­tion­ary screen sage. It’s a film about how he aban­dons his audi­ence at the exact same time that he allows coquet­tish muse, Anne Wiazem­sky, to get away from him. There’s no real rea­son why they should stay togeth­er, as Haz­anavi­cius (pur­pose­ful­ly or oth­er­wise), sug­gests that their rela­tion­ship was lit­tle more than a sil­ly game. He dom­i­nates her intel­lec­tu­al­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly, so it was nev­er meant to be.

What real­ly hits home is that Haz­anavi­cius equates com­mer­cial fail­ure with artis­tic fail­ure – that is to say, art­works which don’t con­nect with an audi­ence are ulti­mate­ly worth­less. As such, he con­tends that Godard’s career (or, at least, his val­ue as a film­mak­er) end­ed around 1968 when he formed his Dzi­ga Ver­tov group as a way to chan­nel the essen­tial spir­it of democ­ra­cy into the process of artis­tic cre­ation and, by exten­sion, relin­quish his icon­ic name. A sequence deal­ing with the film­ing of his ​“red west­ern”, East Wind, is played for laughs when no-one agrees with Godard’s film­ing meth­ods and he’s forced to go along with the vapid major­i­ty vote. Democ­ra­cy has turned him into every­thing he despises.

In this sense, Redoubtable is rather a right-wing work – high­ly scep­ti­cal and deri­sive of rev­o­lu­tion­ary com­mu­nism, very pro-mar­riage and in favour of the iron-fist­ed auteur who impos­es his vision upon the bray­ing under­lings. Even though the film itself is split into chap­ters with wacky Godar­d­ian titles, and it attempts to copy the sat­u­rat­ed, pri­ma­ry-hued ​’60s aes­thet­ic, the sto­ry itself is as con­ven­tion­al as it gets. But maybe this is just Haz­anavi­cius abid­ing by his clear dis­dain for any­thing that might be deemed experimental?

On the plus side, Gar­rel does a very sol­id imi­ta­tion of JLG, and his gift for light com­e­dy does come as some­thing of a sur­prise. Sta­cy Mar­tin, how­ev­er, under­whelms as Wiazem­sky, play­ing her as a prim, air-head­ed and in hyp­not­ic thrall to her famous lover. She spends much of the film nude for no rea­son, to the point that film feels duty bound to make a joke out of it. At its best, it’s flip­pant fun, but with its depic­tion of a hate­ful, haughty, tor­tured artist who is los­ing touch with real­i­ty, it feels much more like a film about Woody Allen than it does Godard.