Anne Collette

The Rohmer-scripted All the Boys Are Called Patrick is among the most straightforward, playful films of Godard’s oeuvre, although the number of references to the world of film already start to pile up. 

France
4*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Eric Rohmer
Director of Photography:
Michel Latouche

Running time: 20 minutes

Original title: Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick
Alternate title: Véronique et Charlotte, ou Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick

With two rather conventional début films – a documentary (about the construction of a dam in southern Switzerland) and a genuinely delightful short (about a woman deciding to spice up her life by engaging in some prostitution) – under his belt, Jean-Luc Godard embarked on his next project in the autumn of 1957. Shot on 35 mm, the result was All the Boys Are Called Patrick, 20 minutes in length and based on a screenplay by that great fanatic of dialogue, Eric Rohmer. Although unexpectedly cute for a Godard production, it clearly anticipated the budding director’s future (pre)occupation with films and form.

The titular Patrick is actually just one playboy who chats up and arranges to hook up with every girl he meets. What makes this story so interesting is that the two girls he happens to cross minutes apart one afternoon are roommates, and it is a shrewd idea to give them different perspectives on being flirted with. However, while the central narrative idea is wonderful, everything that Godard was responsible for (most notably, the multiple references to art and other films) makes this immediately recognisable as the work of a young film enthusiast rather than a director.

Véronique (Nicole Berger) and Charlotte (Anne Collette) are two young women sharing a flat in Paris’s Montparnasse district. Véronique has a lunchtime appointment but tells Charlotte they can meet up at the Luxembourg Gardens between 2 and 3 o’clock. Charlotte, who reads Hegel in the morning and flips through some pulp fiction (The Fate of the Immodest Blonde, which Godard probably chose because it was written by Patrick Quentin) over lunch, is immediately hit upon when she arrives in the public park.

The chatty flirt is called Patrick (played by Jean-Claude Brialy), who is clearly as shallow as a puddle but spouts off multiple references to the world of film in an attempt to impress her. Pretending to speak Japanese, for example, he merely drops the names of two of the era’s foremost directors from the Land of the Rising Sun: “Mizoguchi-Kurosawa?” It would not be a leap to equate the character with Godard himself, although Brialy is infinitely better-looking.

Charlotte eventually acquiesces to having a quick coffee with him. At the café, the two share a table next to a man whose face is buried in a copy of Arts, whose cover provocatively proclaims that “French cinema is dying under false legends”. This article by François Truffaut appeared in May of that year. Patrick persists with the falsehoods as he claims to be studying law, although the film slyly reveals that he has a geometry textbook. Despite herself, Charlotte ultimately arranges a date with him the following evening.

Moments after parting, Patrick runs into Véronique, who is just returning from the Luxembourg Gardens where Charlotte was nowhere to be found. All but beating her into submission to have a drink, they go to another nearby café, where Patrick runs through more or less the same lines as before (he told Charlotte it has been a month since he has picked up a girl and tells Véronique it has been a year) but somehow scores another date out of this forced meeting. The atmosphere of widespread cinephilia evolves as Véronique is also carrying around a copy of Cahiers du cinéma (it’s the July 1957 edition, with Orson Welles on the cover; later in the film, the magazine’s co-founder, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, also gets a shout-out).

Fortunately, unlike many of the director’s later films, this is the work of someone gingerly experimenting with the medium and not yet trying to steamroll over its conventional form. While the editing is rather thrown together, there is still very much a story to latch onto here, and Rohmer, in particular, deserves our gratitude for keeping the dialogue snappy and spontaneous. 

All the Boys Are Called Patrick lags a bit in the second half, when Godard’s camera starts fixating on unnecessary details like the promotional poster for a Pablo Picasso exhibition (perhaps because Patrick, Pablo and the focal point of “Portrait of Paulo” all share the same first two letters, “Pa-“? I wouldn’t put such inanity past Godard) or a giant movie poster for Rebel Without a Cause that the girls have in their bathroom.

However, the verbal sparring keeps our interest, as the action we witness turns ever more complicated thanks to the way the girls tell each other about their respective Patrick. We know the truth, but it is fascinating to see them hiding and altering details about him to impress or slightly put down the other. One says he looks like Cary Grant, the other like the new American actor, Anthony something (presumably Anthony Perkins). Charlotte says she found Patrick incredibly interesting, and Véronique pretends she hates Coca-Cola, while the real events tell a very different story. There is something Rashomon-like about their interaction, albeit with fewer details and more uncertainty about the direction. 

The lack of firm direction from behind the camera is most evident in the endings of many scenes, which often consist of the characters laughing nonsensically at a non-existent joke. However, the story’s three-part structure is sublime in both its simplicity and efficacy. And despite the constant repetition of Beethoven’s “Rondo a capriccio in G Major” on the soundtrack and the camera’s unplanned (or badly executed) movements, the story loses almost none of its appeal, and the climax immediately gives way to the END intertitle. A perfect conclusion to a thoroughly enjoyable 20 minutes.