With Every Man for Himself, after years in the experimental wilderness, Godard marked a return to narrative form but failed to come to terms with the persistent shortcomings of his filmmaking.
Switzerland/France
2.5*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriters:
Jean-Claude Carrière
Anne-Marie Miéville
Directors of Photography:
Renato Berta
William Lubtchansky
Running time: 90 minutes
Original title: Sauve qui peut (la vie)
After more than a decade in the wilderness, Godard marked his return to mainstream cinema with the Switzerland-set Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut (la vie)), released in France in the summer of 1980. But Godard being Godard, “mainstream” is a relative concept when applied to his works. We can start by saying that there is a relatively comprehensible story, the actors don’t break the fourth wall, Godard doesn’t constantly interrupt with a voice-over and all talk of Mao and the proletariat has been banished from the screen. So far, so good.
But Godard hasn’t reinvented himself. Still not a fan of conventional narratives, the 50-year-old director gives us crumbs dressed up as fragments and uses montage and “slow-motion” (more on that in a minute) to stretch proceedings to 90 minutes. Hung on a prologue, three units and an epilogue of sorts, his film explicitly but also half-heartedly tries to corral a pulpous narrative mess into a sturdy structure. The story involves a filmmaker – first name “Paul”, surname “Godard”, because of course (he even smokes a cigar, like the director) – who never works; his former girlfriend, Denise, who has a job at a television studio; and a prostitute named Isabelle with whom Paul spends a rather uneventful night. However, the units, each of which focuses (mostly) on one of the three main characters, are far from solid, and the production could easily have done without the intertitles (“Imaginary”, “Fear” and “Commerce”).
It is to the film’s credit that it spends most of its time on the third story because while the action is continuously flimsy throughout the full 90-minute running time, the acting (by a young Isabelle Huppert) is simply stupendous when compared with the wretched performances in the other two storylines. Although the hilariously narcissistic Jean-Luc Godard uses the opening credits to inform us that this is a film “composed by” him, the three supposed movements of the piece often lack a melody, and harmony is nowhere to be found.
In the prologue, Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) is shown leaving his hotel room, where he has been staying for months in the Swiss town of Nyon, on the banks of Lake Geneva and just next to Jean-Luc Godard’s hometown of Rolle. He is pursued to his car by one of the bellboys, a middle-aged Italian, who asks him to screw his ass since “half the navy” has already had a go. Paul aggressively rebuffs his advances, but this topic isn’t broached again and we never learn what led to this explosive interaction in the first place. This won’t be the last time we are confronted with inexplicable and undeveloped sexual assault, however. When Paul goes to collect his 11-year-old daughter, Cécile, from football practice, he asks the coach whether he has ever fantasised about his own similarly pubescent daughter.
Granted, because of the way the scene is staged (we don’t see Paul speak to the coach; we only hear them off-screen), all of this inappropriate dialogue may be taking place in Paul’s head. One would certainly hope that is the case. But when Paul later meets up with Cécile and her mother to celebrate Cécile’s birthday, his incestuous hints are made very publicly. The topic of incestuous desire appears to be included for no reason other than formal coherence, as the third part of the film features a scene in which a prostitute pretends to be a young girl who, upon returning home from college, parades her vagina in front of her parents. And Godard is nothing if not obsessed with form, however unconventional, amorphous or trivial it may be.
Denise phones Paul to ask him a favour: to collect the filmmaker Marguerite Duras from a local college and bring her to the studio for an interview. Paul very unenthusiastically agrees but eventually sabotages Denise’s plans by taking the acclaimed filmmaker (who only speaks offscreen) straight to the airport. Paul appears to do everything possible to earn the wrath of everyone around him, including us. He is unlikeable and never shows any sign of self-reflection, doubt or internal development. Thankfully, the film pays almost as little attention to him and his balderdash as we do.
When we reach the third and most substantive part of the plot, there is a real sense that the plot may finally be developing into something resembling coherence. The focus shifts to Isabelle, played by the magnetic Isabelle Huppert, who carries the movie with her nuanced performance. It is during this segment that the film delves into the themes of power dynamics, humiliation and gender roles. The conversations between Isabelle and her sister offer some of the clearest insights into the film’s thematic concerns, which are otherwise obscured by Godard’s eternal penchant for disjointed storytelling.
The director’s obsession with form is exemplified by the way he employs slow-motion and abrupt cuts to street scenes throughout the film. These techniques create a jarring, disorienting effect, and one cannot help but feel that Godard is more interested in the visual impact of these messy montages than in using them to advance the narrative.
The film’s score is another point of contention, as the electronic music used during key moments often feels out of place. This is particularly noticeable during a fight scene between Paul and Denise, where the downright laughable musical accompaniment detracts from what could have been an emotionally intense scene. And although this is arguably the film’s most famous sequence, its form feels surprisingly simple for someone who had spent most of his life trying (unsuccessfully, with the exception of Breathless) to add interesting gimmicks to his films. This is not slow motion but a continuous start-stop, which is as frustrating to look at as the term suggests.
Although Every Man for Himself has a few moments of insight that are not in the spotlight, the film primarily strives to be a loose collection of disjointed scenes rather than offering a cohesive narrative. At times, for example, a character (usually a woman) hears music that no one else does, and there is a discussion about men’s need to humiliate women repeatedly. These moments could have offered a real hook for the audience, but because the rest of the film is so fragmented and lacks coherence, their potential value falls through the cracks.
With Every Man for Himself, Godard shows he hasn’t changed much since conducting his audiovisual experiments in the 1960s. He still refuses to play by the norms, and his films continue to look visually unappealing and sound messy. He decided to use a single gimmick (a kind of slow-motion that stops and starts at irregular intervals) for no clear purpose other than to emphasise moments that would be too brief if shown at normal speed. Like a stopped clock, his approach captures a handful of special instances, but he also ruins them by adding terrible music or repeating the same formula over and over again. This is not the work of a serious filmmaker but reminds those in the back that for Godard, filmmaking is a purely solipsistic exercise.