Jean-Luc Godard's episodic opus about a man who interviews various individuals about an unknown project called "Eloge de l'amour," which will involve three couples experiencing four stages of love. The first half of the film, shot in Paris, appears in 35-mm BW and displays some of Godard's most impressive footage. The second half, set in Brittany two years earlier, is shot in super-saturated, bright digital color, deliberately crafted to overwhelm the viewer. The film is oblique, contemplative, challenging, esoteric, and profoundly beautiful. Includes a haunting piano score from Ketil Bjornstad and Arvo Part. Not too be missed.
December 7, 2005 |  | Emotionally and intellectually stunning |  |
By far the most amazing film I've ever seen.
Godard at his very finest. Images and ideas from the film will stick with you for months, even years.
August 20, 2005 | | Some gripping moments, nothing resolved | |
Sounds pretty much like the experience of life, I suppose. In my life, fortunately, I don't have to spend the day watching and listening to men gracelessly weathering the pangs of inner turmoil. Most of the people I know have the good manners to hide their 'quiet desperation' until they're at home and the dog is within kicking range. I love Godard and foreign film, but this 'in-your-face' pretensiousness is inexcusable. Still, offensive anti-American content is worth at least 2 stars!
March 21, 2005Bertolucci said ambiguity, Proust said memory, Marx said gold, Pasolini said human suffering, Fellini said images, Ferreri said alienation, Godard said....cinema. To understand Godard one must understand cinema, the true apocalyptic nature of the art deemed as Lumiere as 'without a future'. Godard is the messiah of the cinema and 'Eloge De L'amour' is a hymn fir an art-form dying since its birth, torn between film and video, color and black and white, collective and personal memory, a century passed and a century about to begin, Godard resents logic and lets the images speak for themselves: images of death, of emptiness, he uses video as a symbol for his own anti-classical way of making films and black and white film as a symbol for the classical cinema of Hitchcock, Ray, Bresson or Mieville that he idolized as a young writer of the Cahiers Du Cinema (symbolized by a torn poster of 'Pickpocket' on a wall). A prophet for the dying age of cinema, Godard has made a film that self-consciously unconscious, his stylized anti-classicalism, his style is more ripe than ever before, melancholic and rebellious, the anarchist's screams have grown to melancholic observations, interrupted by a bit of Beethoven or a question or perhaps even a quotation from the prophet of the Nouvelle Vague, Andre Bazin (who was movingly quoted in the beginning of 'Contempt'). He is the film, he is film, he is the bande a part running with life, cinema, poetry and art and his eye is eternal like that of an immortal saint that cannot be destroyed by the fires of the outside world.
November 6, 2004| | | Philosophically, Metaphorically , Visually Beautiful Film | |
Jean-Luc Godard has once again created a wholly unique cinematic experience in his IN PRAISE OF LOVE. The film requires participation (yes, even work) on the part of the viewer, but the contents of this art piece are so refined and so significant that it begs for repeated viewings, much like the major novels of history. His technique of telling his 'story' is idiosyncratic: there is a narrator who is at the end of a ten-year love affair and wondering why it ended. He states at both the beginning and end of the film that a love afair is in four stages: meeting, sexual passion, separation, and rediscovery. And in exploring the impact of the miracle of love he proceeds to investigate memory and history and how they are inextricably bound in our perception of the world both past and present. To present his case the narrator begins to cast a film to explain his story and selects at least one young girl to play the lover, only to have her blend into the fabric of the remaining of the film just the way glimpses become pieces of memory - distorted, illuminated, altered, reinvented by our present and our past. Much of the film is shot in luminous black and white and then the latter portion is altered by the introduction of color. But in the color portion the fields of color are manipulated into bands of brilliance that are at times artificial, at times precise. An elderly couple is interviewed, homeless people populate portions, making derisive comments on society and especially capitalism, the streets of Paris are there for wandering: Godard free associates visually and philosophically and leaves us with so many beautiful thoughts and phrases and images that one viewing of this film simply cannot suffice to capture them all. Our 'present' as a viewer will be altered by our 'history' of having watched the film before. "When I see a new landscape, it is not really 'new'(it has been there forever) but it is new to us because we relate it to landscapes and places that compose our past". IN PRAISE OF LOVE is a journey inside the mind of Godard and as such it only whets the appetite for more. A beautiful, if difficult, film for people willing to engage.
August 30, 2004More reviews at Amazon.com ...
Daily Birthdays
(9 reviews)