05 · 12 · 18

Jean-Luc Godard’s amour fou

Alonso Díaz de la Vega @diazdelavega1

Is it an excuse for his cinematic experimentation or the personal theme of his work? It’s hard to know if love is one, the other or both, with a director as hermetic as Jean-Luc Godard. In his foremost decade, the 60’s, many of his films told love stories that one might call irredeemably simple —if it weren’t for the radically new way in which they’re told, that is—: a man knows —or he thinks he knows— a woman, he spends a few hours, a few days or a few years of romantic exile by her side and at some point he ends up betrayed by that mystery he never managed to solve. That’s what Breathless (1960), Godard’s first feature film, is about.

Perhaps the most moving track of their relationship is the one left in Alphaville (1965), in which, once again, Karina plays the protagonist’s love interest. Her character, who claims to have been born in a place dominated by a computer, ignores the meaning of the word "love". She’s a human being without emotions who ends up discovering in her individuality the only way to survive a cataclysm that destroys the other inhabitants of Alphaville. In one of many close-ups of Karina’s face in her filmography with Godard, she says at last, in an effort which scales into revelation: Je vous aime. I love you. It’s hard to know what both of them were thinking of when shooting but the emotion is so genuine that it transcends Godard’s typical artificiality. It’s an instant of humanity which suggests a couple struggling to hold their love, even if it’s only in a piece of celluloid.