Passion

“Before a sentence is formed, you can start talking, start living.” “I realize that you have to live the story before you invent it.” These imperatives intertwine in several dimensions through films, in which artistic creation and the search for a story for a filmed movie uniquely merge with the personal search for love and choosing between two women. It is characteristic that neither one nor the other is completed. That is because it is precisely in the openness of this search, the incompleteness of movement, at the end of which is already a completed (and therefore dead) sentence or history, that life unfolds. Life, work, and love. They should be in unity, shouldn't they? The answer to this question forms another dimension of the film, this time a social one, exemplified primarily by the relationship between Isabelle (Huppert) and Michel (Piccolli). Yet it is again characteristic that both have a role in all other dimensions of the film as well. The director Jerzy must consider the inability to finish the film and the inability to choose one of the women as a privilege and joy of life, before he too becomes merely a stiff character in the process of history, whose already spoken chapters are captured in his film (and, among other things, that is why references to the historical events of Poland in 1980/81 are not just a superficial political commentary). Godard's game with form and especially with sound is again inventive, but also more subtle and tranquil than in other films before and after, and its motifs within the film are another stimulus for rewatching. Godard created a film with so many layers that even Rembrandt and Goya could envy while painting their paintings. (28/03/2014)