Cécile Camp

Synopsis
(1)
Someone we hear but don’t see talks of a project entitled Eloge de l’amour, which deals with the four key moments of love: the meeting, the physical passion, the quarrels and separation, the reconciliation. These moments are seen through three couples: young, adult and elderly. Is the project to be a play, a film, or even an opera? A sort of servant or assistant always accompanies the author of the project.

Adults pose a real problem. Unlike old people or young people, an adult is hard to define without telling a story. The author of the project finally meets an extraordinary young woman. In fact, they had already met three years earlier when Edgar had by chance been present during a discussion between some Americans and the young woman’s grandparents. When he comes to tell the young woman that his project is on, Edgar learns that she has died.Read More »

Quote:
Having trodden the path towards ever-increasing obscurity in the 1990s, the eternal maverick of French cinema, Jean-Luc Godard made a surprising come-back with Éloge de l’amour, his first major theatrical release outside of France for well over a decade. More sophisticated and mature than Godard’s increasingly abstract and inward-looking works of the 1990s, it is a film which manages to capture the essence of Godard’s cinema (his political concerns, his love of character, his enthusiasm for cinema and literature, to say nothing of his near-pathological contempt for mainstream cinema). At the same time, it is a challenging work, packed with content whilst employing a minimalist approach reminiscent of Robert Bresson (another great director who is often referred to in the film).
The film is divided in two contrasting parts. It begins with an author’s seemingly doomed attempts to realise a ‘project’ (perhaps a film, but we cannot be certain of this). This part of the film is shot beautifully in black-and-white, almost as a sombre elegy to monochrome cinema. This includes some stunning night shots of Paris, immediately evocative of the Nouvelle Vague cinema of the 1960s in which Godard played such a major part. Two thirds of the way into the film, the mood and style change suddenly, as if we have been propelled into a dream. Thanks to the marvels of the latest digital technology, the images suddenly take on an otherworldly form, with overly saturated colour and some occasional visual distortions.
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