Friday, March 27, 2015

Hail Mary

(Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1985)

JLG's spin on one of the world's great origin stories.  Too much time has passed between my viewing and these notes (a month at least) and my impressions of the film are faded and muddled.  Despite that, I can report that the film is an abundant, searing thing to behold, awestruck with natural beauty, and seemingly touched by grace.  It's as if Godard poured every religiously-tinged feeling he ever harbored into this film, and it nearly bursts with yearning.  Even so, there is still plenty of irony, gnomic pronouncements, and flurry-like collage.  At times, it can seem to be another rehash of his dark view of male-female relationships, with devotion taking the place of romance.  This familiarly fraught binary of male and female can get tiresome, and imbuing it with quasi-religious significance doesn't make it any less so.  But overall it feels like one of his most honestly troubled and self-exposing works.

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