MovieChat Forums > Éloge de l'amour (2001) Discussion > Would a novel have been better?

Would a novel have been better?

posted 16 years ago by jessonderskov
3 replies | jump to latest

I love Jean Luc Godard´s way to philosophize and can hardly get depth enough in films, but this one?

The first thing that appeared to me was to READ his "brain storm", instead of being bombed to the thinking kitchen in confusion of too many opinions and jumps in such short time. It seems like the scenery is not important and JLG wants to tell so much at one time - it felt exhausting.

"And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical." (Supertramp: Logical song)

[–] Hyman_Flomax 13 years ago

97 minutes of staring at a blank screen would have been the only successful treatment of this material. He has nothing intelligent to say, and no interesting way of saying it.

If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive.

[–] ThreeSadTigers 13 years ago

It's not about what he says; it's how he says it. The film is about lost love, and it conveys the feeling of lost love as a sensory experience; placing the viewing in particular state of mind through experiments with sound and image.

Most of Picasso's paintings aren't actually depictions of anything. They exist for the sake of celebrating creativity; the 'how' is more important than the 'what.' Godard's films work on a similar level.

[–] IceboxMovies 13 years ago

The first thing that appeared to me was to READ his "brain storm", instead of being bombed to the thinking kitchen in confusion of too many opinions and jumps in such short time.

Oh, Godard's "brainstrom" can be understand quite clearly enough as a movie. His lazy anti-Americanism, his laughable anti-Hollywood polemics, even his creeping anti-Semitism... had this movie taken the entire length of a book it would have made me want to puke, like Michel at the end of Breathless. But at least that was a great film.

"What I don't understand is how we're going to stay alive this winter."