Eloge De L'Amour Reviews

In praise of what??

This is a thick, multi-layered film that is not really a film more a meditation on both film, what it means to tell a story and how a story relates to life. There is a constant stream of information coming from the screen and the soundtrack and they don?t always correspond. In other words the screen is showing you one thing whilst the soundtrack tells you another, it might even be telling you several things as sounds and voices are overlaid onto each other. In addition it is not a linear story, if indeed it is a story at all in the conventional sense. Just to illustrate this every so often throughout the film a man appears who is reading a book which consists entirely of blank pages. In places Godard shows his old mischievous side as in the scene where a tall American woman wearing an above the knee skirt gets into a Lotus Elise - modestly.

Broadly speaking the film is in two parts, the first black and white, the second in colour. The first part is about young people playing in the film, the second about old people remembering the beginning of the story of what might be the film. And throughout the adults try to make the film and philosophise about both art and film and about what someone called the American colonisation of our subconscious. If you like the film goes backwards whilst going forwards.

It helps to have seen a fair amount of Godard?s earlier films so that you have an idea of what to expect but even so it is a difficult film to understand because it is saturated with references to other movies, to books, to philosophy and past history and to try and fit it together is hard work. I?ve seen it twice now and I am going to have to watch it again because I know I haven?t grasped it all yet and in fact I?m still not sure if there is all that much there to be grasped hence the indeterminate 3 stars.

[Highly rated reviewer]

In praise of love

Yes, that is the english translation of this film's title. What you see on the screen, however, appears to have very little to do with love. Godard has a theory of love that it goes through four stages: meeting, passion, separation and reconciliation. If the film is an exploration of that then it went right over my head and I couldn't summon up the courage to subject myself to a second viewing - not yet anyway. As usual with Godard there are lots of references to just about anything under the sun, some of which I got (for example the homage to Robert Bresson), most I did not. In an earlier film, the wonderful 'Le Mepris' for instance, the references form part of a recognisable story line. Here there is no recognisable through line and this viewer found it difficult to care about what was going on on the screen. Godard probably does not mind that his films have become so inaccessible to most of his audience. This means that very few of his films from the last 30 years get a cinema screening in this country. He is one of the true geniuses of 20th century cinema who has produced some great work. Wherever he is wandering to at the moment this is one film lover who is not going with him.

Pretentious Drivel

Pretentious Drivel - as usual from this director.

A fine return for Godard

At last, you might sigh, a Godard film you can watch AND enjoy, without having to worry about having your Revolutionary Cap on, contemporary philosophers dictionary at your side and a strong cup of coffee to stay awake.

Filmed in crisp black and white this is apparently his first film he's filmed on the very streets of Paris in almost 30 years. Remember Alphaville? Bande A Part? Breathless?

It's sentimental, moving, forcefully moving mirrored by a luscious score. Let this picture seduce you back into the 'avant garde' as it did me.

....of course, I meant

Trying to understand this movie took so much effort that I got me French new-wave directors mixed-up. Doncha just hate it when that happens?

L'ennui

Hard for a relatively casual viewer to see the genius in this film, very slow, effectively no story and black and white just annoys me I'm afraid. Not really a film in the expected sense and even my very academic university lecturer french mate couldn't get through it. Not sure who this movie is going to appeal to at all.

You have to be a die-hard Godard fan for this one

We did not finish this one. Having seen Band a Part and Bout de Souffle and enjoyed these very much, we leapt into the Godard future with this one. It was not worth it for us. Too much inside knowledge of the French movie (Henri Langlois) scene etc. is required. See the other ones first and then decide if you are a die-hard Godard fan.

Customer Review

...and visually stunning. Godard's "Eloge De L'Amour" is all of these things. The film requires at least two viewings; I couldn't make head nor tail of it the first time I watched it as it has a reverse narrative, similar to Lynch's "Mulholland Drive". "Eloge" has no real plot as such ; it is more of a series of observations and philosophical musings on love, history, politics and art ,linked together vaguely by certain key phrases culled from writings from obscure intellectuals. It is a film of two halves; the first half is shot in monochrome in Paris and it takes place two years after the events of the latter half of the film, set in a Breton fishing village and filmed in an unusual colour-splashed digital video format (think David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes" video). In Paris a young, high-brow film maker, Edgar, is auditioning for parts in an artistic "project" of his about the various ages and stages of love and ,in so doing, meets a girl whom he first met in Brittany several years before while doing research for another project. It was this encounter with her and her grandparents, who were leading figures in the French Resistance in WW2, that provided the inspiration for Edgar's current project. The film's strength is its visual appeal; there are lots of beautiful images and stylish imagery used throughout ,complemented by some haunting piano music. However it has several weaknesses that make it a difficult film to watch and enjoy; it is disjointed, thin on plot and the philosophical musings are very abstract and often inpenetrable. After watching the film (twice), I found it hard to decipher what it's message was; it was certainly anti-American and anti-globalist in nature ,especially in the realm of popular culture ,but for me it was essentially a proclamation for the present to reclaim the past; for life to be viewed as both a collective and individual linear journey of self discovery based on the "historical" ties of love that bind ,rather than a series of disjointed , crypto-incongruous experiences of pleasure and pain to be consumed, digested and discarded , both from the collective and individual memory. "Eloge" is a poetic and elegiac film ; a film for philosophers , a film for "adults".

In Praise of...?

Like several other reviewers, I have read the critics' reviews and selected this film because of its high rating, but am just as baffled as they are. Yes, there are 'arty' cinematic techniques but if a film causes one to not care less what happens, and start watching the clock to see how long is left to run, something has gone wrong with it as a means of communication. The best way to communicate is at least to leave memorable images in the mind of the viewer, or - better still - to tell a story (compare the parables of Jesus, which did both - unlike this film).

Truffaut's having a laugh with us!

This film has most of the essentials of great European art cinema, many of which were innovated by Truffaut himself. Sumptuous atmosphere and photography, fine acting and thought-provoking dialogue sometimes conveying stunning insight into the zeitgeist. The only problem is that it is almost completely incomprehensible. Give me 'Andrei Rublev' any day.