Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion is one of
his most gorgeously twisted art objects, a work of stunning craft and visual
sumptuousness which, even as it ravishes us, persistently prompts us to find
such beauty lacking, both on its own terms and as an expression of the hermetic
industrial and financial infrastructure which allows its creation. While it’s
seldom been worthwhile to try summarizing a Godardian narrative, Passion
revolves around a stalled film project taking place in proximity to a factory
riddled with industrial unrest and to a nearby motel, the proprietors and
workers of which interact in various ways; the director is from Poland, at that
moment in time a focus of political engagement, the very evocation of which tends
to condemn the decadent irrelevance of the film within the film and all that it
drives. The project appears to consist primarily of (again, gorgeous)
recreations of iconic paintings and historical snapshots, with no apparent protagonists;
the director spends much time worrying about the quality of the lighting, while
his producer continually hustles for money; as such it’s in an intriguing dynamic
with Godard’s own film, which has an emblematically art-house cast (Isabelle
Huppert, Hanna Schygulla, Michel Piccoli), all of course subservient to the
governing scheme (Huppert’s character stutters: Piccoli’s perpetually coughs; Godard
seems most interested in Schygulla for her face, including one wondrous
searching close-up that recalls Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc).
In the end, the director sets off for his home country with some of the film’s
women tagging along; to one who balks at getting in because she doesn’t like cars,
he explains that it’s not a car but a magic carpet - a silly line, but one which
works on her, and which perhaps points to the possibility of escaping a
cinematic dead end, for a creative renewal more rooted in the real world.
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