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Amazon.co.uk Review
Jean-Luc Godard's eagerly awaited Eloge de l'Amour was one of the highlights of the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, dividing critics between those who loved its extraordinary beauty and those who found it hard to discern an overall theme from a multitude of contending threads. Certainly the plot is elusive. A young writer (Bruno Putzulu) wants a dark-haired woman (Cecile Camp) to play a role in his evolving project, a study of the four stages of love: meeting, physical passion, separation and reconciliation. By the time the funding comes through, she has killed herself and he looks back to the time when he might, or might not have met her before. Above all, the picture explores the blurred territory between the personal and the collective memory and the difference between a life which is simply lived and one in which the individual brings the power of imagination to their existence. Ultimately, the characters remain curiously faceless and the film fragments into a kaleidoscope of merging images, colours and landscapes and collective experience triumphs.
Godard's legendary status as the godfather of French New Wave cinema has long since passed into the realms of cliché. Here, the "present" is shot on the streets of Paris in black and white. Godard's city of light looks as timeless as it did back in 1966 when he made Masculin Feminin. The second part of the film is shot in digital video, absorbing the audience with its electrically intense, mesmerising colours.
Eloge de l'Amour is, more than anything, a sensual experience. Godard provokes but doesn't provide any answers. But fans of his more polemical work will enjoy the satirised American producers who want to purchase the rights to the Resistance couple's story. Americans have no memory, says the author. So they buy it from others. Godard never was a fence-sitter. --Piers Ford
On the DVD: the main DVD extra on this disc sounds enticing: an interview with one of the world’s most innovative and influential directors. Yet the reality is disappointing, as it’s merely a transcript. The biography is more of the same. The only other additional feature is the subtitles, though there’s no option to turn them off. --Nikki Disney
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