Hélas pour moi (1993) Reviews

• A difficult masterpiece but undoubtedly worth the effort

  Chris_Docker2012-10-08

  Are you easily distracted? When I first watched Gaspar Noé's 2002 film, Irreversible, I sat near the screen and found the cacophony of images overpowering. On my second viewing, I sat further back, more easily contemplating the 'bigger picture,' appreciating a remarkable film. Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway,' suggests a similar psychology in her 'stream-of-consciousness' where writing emulates experience: we need to step back before we can tell, what is the pertinent information? what is the story about? In real life, we may only see things in true proportion retrospectively. This psychological hurdle forcefully confronts us in Hélas Pour Moi. I strongly urge you to see it twice if possible. The story is more logical and flowing when you know what is happening. You can appreciate the many subtleties, and the exquisite cinematography of Caroline Champetier. Failing that, I would recommend sitting at the rear of the auditorium. We meet a publisher, Abraham Klimt. He has turned detective to investigate a strange story sent to him of divine intervention, though part of the manuscript is missing. We catch up with Klimt as he seeks out Simon and Rachel Donnadieu, our main characters, as well as the one witness who maybe saw the key event: did God take human form to have sex with Rachel, by inhabiting the body of Simon, her husband? We are subject to the same sort of events-discordance, people coming and going, conversations overlapping, as Klimt might, as he searches for truth in an unhelpful environment. This non-sequitur approach goes on for ages, and only in the last 30 minutes or so of footage does the story congeal for a first time viewer. It re-works a play based on the legend of Zeus, Alcmene and her husband Amphitryon. In the Ancient Greek, the divine Zeus takes the human form of Amphitryon to mate with Amphitryon's betrothed. In the original, this leads to the birth of Heracles, born of divine father and human mother. But in Godard's modern setting, the story just goes as far as sexual union. God, once known as Zeus, now seems more Christian, and by implication can even lead us to question the veracity of the standard Mary-and-Joseph story. Klimt has no preconceptions: he just wants the truth. There is no strong statement on whether one should believe in divine intervention, or just go for the more obvious explanation: that Simon, although estranged, is feeling horny, he suffers an obsession, and assumes a divine persona which the ever-devoted Rachel believes. "All men are the shadow of God to the women who love them." (We do however, see a low-budget and highly effective scene where God, looking rather scruffy and unkempt, enters Simon's body.) Godard called Hélas pour Moi "a complete flop." Yet, while difficult and obscure, it garnered critically praise and was his first feature to be distributed in the U.S. for ten years. Depardieu (who plays Simon) abandoned the film halfway through shooting, exasperated at Godard's methods. "It could have been a good movie," said Godard, "if Depardieu was willing to try. But he was not interested in the movie, in working to make it right. Of course, he said, 'Godard is a genius.' He was just making it for my name." But without Depardieu, the film would not have been financed. Hélas pour Moi is replete with dozens of obscure references (from French and Italian literature, from philosophy, from theology) and quotations have sometimes been 'edited' by Godard. This makes it a particularly difficult film even if it wasn't so already. In the jangling, difficult-to-watch first two-thirds, apparently discordant ideas and images are set against the beautiful backdrop of nature and Lake Geneva. Such style is intrinsic to the content. "I feel a strange revulsion at the thought of crudely expressing what the spectator has probably guessed of his own accord," says Klimt, but it could have been from Godard's own lips. For a while, I wonder if the film will develop into a polemic against religion – no stranger to Godard's virulence – perhaps replacing it with Art as the highest of aspirations. Yet, "there is always something depressing about the portrayal of crude reality," and belief is heralded in what could be interpreted as a positive light when a character asserts, "I believe because it is absurd." When logic fails, after all, we are left with belief. And what is truth? "Truth is what keeps the walls of houses upright, what keeps the roofs from collapsing." This is just one reading. We could view the film as an essay on human feelings. An enquiry into sexual union as an aspect of communicating with God (Rachel likens the gesture of hands in prayer to hands folded in an embrace around one's lover.) Or how an artist seeks meaning in the world. Or we can follow the poetry of Champetier's photography, enjoying the way subjects are framed in nature, focused and de-focused, and the beauty of the moment as a bicycle falls over, or a woman's hat blows off. As a feminist study, or as the way history (and literature) is created and redacted: the French words 'histoire (history) and 'histoires' (stories) being symbiotic for Godard - who entitled his history of cinema 'Histoire(s) du Cinéma.' Metaphysical aspects are drawn together in the opening, and in the final coda, halfway through the credits. These skilfully harmonise Godard's ideas on the nature of perception and the evanescent nature of truth. "When my father's father's father had a difficult task to accomplish, he went to a certain place in the forest, lit a fire, and immersed himself in silent prayer. And what had to be done was done." The ritual was diluted over time. "But we do know how to tell the story." Never shy at innovation, Godard tells his story in a new, deep and meaningful way.

• Reverie

  chaos-rampant2011-04-11

  I try to be wary of sweeping claims because usually they sweep away too much of details that matter, but here I feel confident in saying Hélas pour moi is perhaps the most difficult, demanding Godard film I've encountered thus far. The dialectic tappestry is perfected here, which Godard would subsequently use for the Histoire(s) films, and it's presented to us in the form of a dreamlike reverie. To disentangle this web the film requires we go deeper than the level it operates, an almost insurmountable task. Charles Baudelaire mused on the idea of the "flaneur", the "stroller" who walks the city in order to experience it. In the emergent observer-participant dialectic, it is important for the observer to remain detached so that free association, the spontaneous and impromptu, can suggest its own portals of understanding. This dissolution of apparent order by which we're taught to experience the world, opens doors in the mind. Likewise, I believe it is important to experience Godard with a certain detachment, to walk through the film in order to experience it. The other aspect is the dreamlike nature. Where we do we go when we sleep? Some will say we go in the mind, where we enact vivid, abstract bits of life. Without making the distinction any more overbearing than it needs to be, I'll say that instead we go back into the body from where, in the silence of sleep, we can hear faint traces of the mind's constant, routine stream of thought. Sleeping, we can hear the mind murmur to itself. This should be the most tangible, profound awakening to the illusionary reality of the mind available to us. The film is this state of consciousness as existential murmur, where characters tenaciously grapple with ideas of love and death in vivid, abstract bits that begin or end abruptly. In pursuit of these ideas, it's thought that the mind should matter, the greatest folly of the French Renaissance, and which notion the young French artists (dandies, surrealists, Dada, Nouvelle Vague) continuously assailed and challenged. When I say Helas is a difficult film, is when Godard complicates all this by the presence of strange entities that omnipresently exist outside the frame of that consciousness. These entities are in the narrative but not of it, instead they appear as visitations to that world. One is a book editor who wanders the movie trying to piece together a crucial moment that happened between two lovers in the past, looking for the "missing pages", first of this affair as though it's a book written somewhere, second of the narrative of the movie itself since now his quest for answers becomes ours and we also want to find out what happened, then on a third level life in general. This quest for answers Godard wisely leaves frustrated, as reflection of the uncertain and peremptory. All these properly remain enigmas, as we know life to be true. The other is a significantly curious device, where the woman cannot recognize her lover, played by Gerard Depardieu, who then poses as or is occupied by God. In the fantastical, surreal conversations that follow in a veranda overlooking the sea, love is put to the test, purpose in life, all of creation. Here, more importantly than anywhere else in the film, Godard gives us one of his famously thunderous cuts (like the one in Le Mepris). The woman faces away from him as if to scorn him, the screen pulses with light for a second, then another character, elsewhere, muses to the book editor that "God is a character, like me and you, only forms exist". Perfect! What I see as a desire for contemplation that begins in Godard's work in films like Prenom Carmen, here for the first time leads to a degree of awareness. Bergman never saw this far in his metaphysical anxiety, Antonioni saw further yet because he escaped that murmur of the mind. This awareness of the world as it is he examined again in JLG/JLG, his self styled portrait, and the several Histoire(s) films. Histoire(s) though ends with a more profound realization, that only when life is lived in full, with all the forces available to our body, only then can life stop questioning itself and accept itself as the true answer.

• Heavenly Godard

  rick-2202010-02-06

  I've just watched it and this is by far the most complex and demanding Godard movie I've seen (I've seen about 15 of his movies now). Colin Maccabe's introduction on the DVD helped in getting bits and pieces of what was going on. But five minutes in I realized I was again trapped in the idea of (desperately) wanting to find a narrative thread, which only lead to confusion and even frustration. Then I just decided to let go and try and forget about cinematic restrictions and just let Godard have his way. Obviously in the end (what end?) I still could not get my head around it, but it had quite a lot of impact all the same. It feels profound and important and confrontational and provoking. It looks beautiful. That suffices for now.

• a contemporary existential allegory

  claudiop2003-05-07

  One of my all-time favourite films, IMHO one of Godard's most beautiful and reflective films. It is a contemporary existential allegory and elegeic in style. My recollection is that the pacing is languid and reflective. The emotional and spiritual crises are compelling and insightful, typical of Godard's obsessive observations of relationships. Depardieu and Masliah are wonderful. Uplifting experience. I saw it in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in 94.

• a rumination

  Pan322011-09-12

  Hélas pour moi 1993 Jean-Luc Godard's rumination on the meaning of it all i.e. creation, it's fruits shown as lovely landscapes; its music with snatches of a variety of masterpieces: as a counterpoint to the inheritors of creation (by accident or design) a rather messy confused lot, as confused as the hybrid god of Zeus and the Christian god of the troika who appears in the body of Simon, wife of Rachael, to experience first hand sexual pleasure (surely anathema to the Christian deity if one is to believe his vicar) in defiance of the death of His belief or at any rate it's gradual dissolution and relegation to a curious relic. Best to enjoy the view and skim the weighty thoughts unless a keen sense of filmic histrionics exists.