Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

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dda1996a
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Re: Redoubtable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#26 Post by dda1996a » Sat May 20, 2017 4:58 pm

When was it shown? The Cannes site shows it premiers tomorrow?

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domino harvey
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Re: Redoubtable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#27 Post by domino harvey » Sat May 20, 2017 5:10 pm

Two critic screenings today at Cannes. One just ended like an hour ago, the other is about to start

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domino harvey
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Re: Redoubtable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#28 Post by domino harvey » Tue Jun 20, 2017 2:00 pm

This movie just followed me on Twitter, I'm not sure how I feel about that

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Oedipax
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Re: Redoubtable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#29 Post by Oedipax » Fri Jun 23, 2017 2:20 pm

I thought it was pretty terrible, but I will admit they got the production design dead-on with the interiors meant to mimic the look of La Chinoise and other films of his from that period (2 or 3 Things, etc), and it's serviceable light entertainment (with some okay laughs) for the first half or so. Once it gets to the dissolution of their relationship, the film hit a real wall for me, and overstayed its welcome in a major way. That's to say nothing of the overall blasphemous conceit of making a comedy about JLG's militant period, but I knew that going in. I only watched it out of a morbid curiosity and while it could have been much worse, it's still pretty bad.

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Dylan
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Re: Redoubtable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#30 Post by Dylan » Fri Jun 23, 2017 2:43 pm

Oedipax, what is the music like? Does it use tracks from Nouvelle Vague films or is it an original score?

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Oedipax
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Re: Redoubtable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#31 Post by Oedipax » Fri Jun 23, 2017 10:52 pm

Dylan wrote:Oedipax, what is the music like? Does it use tracks from Nouvelle Vague films or is it an original score?
You do hear "Mao Mao" from La Chinoise at one point. My memory could be totally off, but I think that's the only real use of something from the nouvelle vague in the film, and I don't remember much about the score otherwise!

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Ribs
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Re: Redoubtable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#32 Post by Ribs » Sat Mar 24, 2018 10:31 am

Cohen has retitled this Godard mon Amour for the US; it’s releasing in NY/LA on 4/20. Poster:

Image

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domino harvey
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Re: Redoubtable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#33 Post by domino harvey » Sat Mar 24, 2018 10:40 am

I still haven't gotten around to watching my copy of this, but that has to be one of the greatest pullquotes of all time-- I can't stop laughing! Bravo, Cohen (though the US title sux)

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knives
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Re: Le Redoubtable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#34 Post by knives » Sat Mar 24, 2018 9:08 pm

Definitely up there with Lost Highway's.


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domino harvey
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#36 Post by domino harvey » Sat Apr 21, 2018 2:08 am

Michel Hazanavicius must have a death wish to make a film like this, as yet again he’s gone to the well of tackling cinema in a vibrant way that will please no one ici et ailleurs— “Oh honey, you think that’s what a silent film is like?” —> “Uh, Godard never would have said that!” What a thankless, masochistic, wonderful job he does here, yet again. I would level my Godard bonafides against anyone, and I loved this film. I think it is more or less accurate in how it reads Godard as a person during this period, and does so by not only recognizing his genius but also that he was a complete asshole. I have admiration for and intellectual interest in the films from Godard’s Dziga Vertov period, but no one with an opinion you’d trust would ever claim they were superior to his earlier work. This is hardly a radical position to take, and doesn’t negate his importance or the validity of his later work. That this study of Godard was made by a filmmaker who proclaims fondness but not hero worship is all the more impressive for how much it gets right, and perhaps this was the only way to balance the necessary skepticism needed to not turn this into hagiography while avoiding it being a hit piece.

I suspect Hazanavicius is speaking as much for himself as Godard in much of the film— one can easily conjure disappointed audience and critic responses to the temerity of him making the Search and wondering when he’d make another funny film (and of course he also married his star and cast her in everything he does, including this). He’s done so here. This movie is laugh out loud hilarious, often darkly so, and with its own share of untranslatable French language jokes very much in the spirit of its subject. I liked every last dumb running joke, and thought the film never fell into the Life of Emile Zola school of idiotic biographical explanations or exploitations. This film visually quotes every feature from his first period, and yet it feels more akin to a biographical portrait of a painter framing cinematic scenes in the style of their canvases— why take offense or scoff, quotation is such a hallmark of Godard that the only ill-fitting aspect is that here they’re easily attributed!

There are so many great moments here, but I have special fondness for the La chinoise screening with Godard squirming in his seat at people noisily file out twenty minutes in while others snooze away, as this is precisely what happened when I screened the film on my college campus over a decade ago (right down to the timing, though we were indoors!). The movie also convincingly argues that being stuck inside a car on a long drive with Godard would be pure hell. And the Mocky cameo is a scream!

To reiterate, I loved this. See it, and then fight me on it, because Le Redoutable is smart, funny, clever, and as good a film about this subject as could possibly be conjured.

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knives
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#37 Post by knives » Sun Apr 22, 2018 10:44 am

Can I be made excited by your comments and still find British Sounds better than A Woman is a Woman?

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whaleallright
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michael Hazanavicius, 2017)

#38 Post by whaleallright » Mon Apr 23, 2018 9:11 am

domino harvey wrote:during this period
the (perhaps unintended) implication is that Godard is no longer an asshole, and nothing I've heard or read suggests any such thing. :|

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Rayon Vert
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#39 Post by Rayon Vert » Mon Apr 23, 2018 9:50 am

If so, a really sensitive one, I'd say. See the end of the Morceaux de conversation DVD.

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Ribs
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#40 Post by Ribs » Mon May 14, 2018 3:30 pm

This is delightful - I'm not like, a big Godard person, but I love the way this treats him and all his work after this period with such utter, irredeemable contempt. It's a great story of a guy who starts off a politically radical asshole and becomes an even bigger asshole. The entire time this was going I was thinking of a tweet thread from a few weeks or months ago from Eric Allen Hatch about how this generation of young people and students that enabled art house's boom in the US in the 60s and 70s have become the least adventurous group of theatergoers, the only movies targeted to them incredibly safe and easy and nothing like the films that inspired them so much when they were young; this movie is taking possibly the pinnacle of the mainstream "difficult" foreign art film directors and giving him a jokey, super easy, not at all difficult, and lightweight biopic that has basically nothing to do structurally with anything he ever did besides using some of the hallmarks without any innovation or understanding of them in its own right. Plus, it has Berenice Bejo, a redeeming factor for most movies!

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whaleallright
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#41 Post by whaleallright » Mon May 14, 2018 3:57 pm

Ribs wrote:I'm not like, a big Godard person, but I love the way this treats him and all his work after this period with such utter, irredeemable contempt. It's a great story of a guy who starts off a politically radical asshole and becomes an even bigger asshole.
Unless I'm misreading you, the "but" doesn't belong there; it seems like you might appreciate this film precisely because it flatters your impression of Godard and his work. (Or maybe you just like it because it's so proudly dumb, without agreeing with it?)

I don't think there's much debate that he is (or can be) an asshole, but his work "after this period" (which is to say, the past 50 years) is often utterly remarkable, and I'd say at least as interesting as anything he did before. Hazanavicius has the right to his tastes, but I get the vague sense that the film, or at least its admirers, are using the portrayal of Godard as a means of validating their dismissal of his body of post-1960s work.
nothing like the films that inspired them so much when they were young
This just seems like what happens when people, of any "generation," age—or most people (not Godard himself, obviously). I don't think it's unique to Baby Boomers. Besides which, some of Godard's early features fit a contemporary notion of "cool," with their nonstop pop-culture allusions, pop-art visuals, etc.; that probably had more to do with their appeal (then and now) than their most disjunctive aspects.

And really only a few of his films of this period ever really made a splash on the American and European art-house circuit. Plenty of others—including some of the more "difficult," or dense or austere ones— were barely released, seen largely at festivals and a few adventurous cinemas you could count on one or two hands. His counterculture celebrity never made him as big of a draw as Bergman or Antonioni, for example.

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Ribs
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#42 Post by Ribs » Mon May 14, 2018 4:31 pm

You are misreading me - I do not personally get much out of most of his movies, I don’t think that means he should be removed from the canon or something. Just that I have other things I like more! I love the movie’s conjection that the stuff after 68 is boring and confusing and bad because I think it’s a hilariously mainstream position to take, in line with this movie’s audience, in my view.

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whaleallright
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#43 Post by whaleallright » Mon May 14, 2018 5:36 pm

Ah, I see, I think I may not have fully recognized the irony in your post!

To me it's like making a biopic of Joyce and hand-waving away everything after Dubliners. (It's really hard for me to imagine someone seeing, say, First Name: Carmen, much less Goodbye to Language, and thinking, "This guy has lost it!")

It's funny how this film brings out two irritating habits on the part of cinephiles: on the one hand, humorless folks like me who complain that the film is some kind of sacrilege, on the other, art-house philistines who use it to validate their crumpled nostalgia and anti-intellectualism. I guess the film is doomed to be caught in the middle, but if it works for you as a film, it works. Nothing I've seen by Hazanavicius suggests this would be remotely up my alley.

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domino harvey
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#44 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 14, 2018 5:55 pm

It's not critical of everything he made after the sixties, just the DV stuff. Which, again, is a valid reading of his oeuvre, even for people who love Godard. I find the insistence that a fan of this film must align oneself against Godard's later period incorrect. Even if I loved the Dziga Vertov works (rather than merely respecting them and finding them of interest), it would be possible to love this film too. Why do so many Godard fans have to go out of their way to signal their "superior" appreciation of Godard in relation to this film? So many reviews and now discourse here too is devolving into this, and it's unhelpful

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whaleallright
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#45 Post by whaleallright » Mon May 14, 2018 11:13 pm

domino harvey wrote:I find the insistence that a fan of this film must align oneself against Godard's later period incorrect.
no one here insisted anything of the kind.

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domino harvey
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#46 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 14, 2018 11:44 pm

Really?
whaleallright wrote:Hazanavicius has the right to his tastes, but I get the vague sense that the film, or at least its admirers, are using the portrayal of Godard as a means of validating their dismissal of his body of post-1960s work.

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The Narrator Returns
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#47 Post by The Narrator Returns » Mon May 14, 2018 11:46 pm

Okay, but aside from that, what have the Romans ever done for us?

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dda1996a
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#48 Post by dda1996a » Tue May 15, 2018 1:19 am

To chime in, I found incredibly mediocre for precisely all the reasons Hazanavicius thought it might work. The film is stuck between two modes of film I love yet doesn't hit both. It doesn't really understand Godard as a person, but I mean as a character (could care less about "real life" Godard, just that his character feel, well understood). But the film continually presents him as a man who fails to really understand his situation, merely treating him as a joke (and the film doesn't much care about '68 as well). But the film rang utterly hollow for me as a comedy. Its never really funny, and Hazanavicius tries to use Godard's own post-modern cinematic jokes on him. Yet mostly he just thinks taking them wholesale from various Godard films (and I've seen a few and know enough to recognize them) and drop them here will be funny. But all I really wished for was to watch Godard's actual films (and no-one is happier than me that I still have half of his filmography waiting). Because his re-appropriation is simply taking them and planting them without any consideration for their place in the film. The only one I really did enjoy was when they walk on the sidewalk and theres graffiti on the wall (would love someone to translate the writings though, I could catch barely anything).
My biggest problem is that the film itself is boring. If the film is about the pair's relationship, well they lacked any chemistry or much anything for that matter (I like both actors enough, but their relationship starts as not very romantic and I am led to believe becomes worst. Always stated, never really felt). Which might have been what the real relationship been like.
I am not asking for real-life fidelity, merely that what I watched had took a stand regarding it's own ambitions.
I think its telling that the film doesn't go with Godard to shut down Cannes, yet shows its affect on Godard and Wiazemsky's relationship. If the film isn't really interested in the politics, fails to show both the relationship and the person itself and is barely ever funny, then what is the point?
In fact I think making this about Wiazemsky completely might have interested me more. Those scenes were people are her age embarrass her so called "genius" husband is played here for laughs. Would have loved to see the sad, psychologically acute version of that.

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whaleallright
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#49 Post by whaleallright » Tue May 15, 2018 11:50 am

this
Hazanavicius has the right to his tastes, but I get the vague sense that the film, or at least its admirers, are using the portrayal of Godard as a means of validating their dismissal of his body of post-1960s work.
is not the same as
the insistence that a fan of this film must align oneself against Godard's later period incorrect.
(emphasis mine)
I recognize that there's rhetorical value in lowering the target.

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Ribs
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Re: Le Redoutable (Michel Hazanavicius, 2017)

#50 Post by Ribs » Tue May 15, 2018 12:35 pm

Like I've said, I feel the movie isn't trying to be a film about Godard that is at all like Godard, but is instead a super-safe version of that story that takes the position of his work of most of the boring older people who'd go seek out a Godard biopic at their art house that his movies were good and then they became super difficult and bad. Within the confines of this movie itself I think there's definitely some suggestion that he had already "lost it" with La chinoise - everybody we see in the theater reacting to it seems utterly indifferent to it and generally confused, and of course everyone's telling Godard he should make less serious films like he used to. This film takes the position that you, as the audience, began to be infuriated and not like his work anymore over this period, and reflects the wacky circumstances that led to that, a once-talented artist getting lost in his own ego. Yeah, like Domino says, it doesn't really have a position on the later stuff after he "came back" to slightly more commercial filmmaking, just on the late 60s-70s work, but I think that period is important in-and-of-itself due to some of my aforementioned preconceived notions about the people who first made Godard such a sensation "aging out" of films like these.

This is a totally different ballgame in terms of relative quality, but for a long time I had serious difficulty with Burton's Ed Wood, because I really struggled to reconcile whether it was a hagiography or a hatchet job, the ending of it leaving me so uncomfortable as I don't know whether I'm supposed to be thrilled he fulfilled his dreams or horrified that those were his dreams. I've come around on it and understand it has the position of doing both simultaneously, and that makes it better than being one or the other: in this case, though, I think the film positions the filmmaker as fundamentally misguided throughout without anyone appreciating his art beyond the man himself (and maybe Gorin, I guess). It's not a totally reasonable comparison but something about thinking this through made me remember my feelings about the Burton film and how I eventually came to adore it.

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