“But I wanted this to be a narrative. I still do. Nothing from outside to distract memory.” The futuristic voiceover of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vertigo-film New Wave confounds; its statement opposing interruption is itself an interruption. Roger Lennox’s hard-luck life is interrupted by an automobile heedlessly driven by Elena, a rich businesswoman. “Are you in pain?” she asks. A hand of each reaches through spacious sky (and time?) to touch the other. Elena might as well ask, “Are you in the moment or memory? Alive or dead?” She as easily could be asking herself these questions.
Characters walk back and forth. In this film, people pace that way outdoors. Indoors, the camera itself tracks back and forth between different sets of characters, the conversation of one set superimposed on the image of another, and the voices of different sets interrupted—or united?—by voiceover. Roger challenges Elena (who has taken him in and become his lover) with the reality of other people, including his, that her self-absorption keeps her from believing in. “Is my brother real?” has replaced “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as a central moral question.
In a way we also wonder, given Roger’s restrained voice and philosophical detachment. Did Roger actually die as a result of the road accident? (Elena confesses, to him, “remorse.”) Eventually Roger is goaded into mountain water by Elena, who knows he cannot swim and watches him drown. Whose consciousness this water?: his; Elena’s; ours; Godard’s; Roger’s brother Richard’s? Richard, his brother’s identical twin, proves the more aggressive, volatile. He takes over the business. Inserted shots of the Swiss drowning lake haunt the film, which includes another outstretched hand, another drowning.
Or does it? Resurrection? Second chance?
We do not “live life.” We navigate its competing claims. Or drown.
Tags: Alain Delon, Godard/Grunes
January 17, 2008 at 11:15 am
This is a great film, though I really wonder if it holds together as a narrative at all, despite the hints of an irrational soap opera story (twins, doubling, faked or mistaken deaths, shady business transactions) lurking in there somewhere. For me, it’s all about sound, especially the sound of voices, and the multilayered soundtrack (one of Godard’s most complex) seems to exist independently of and comment on the “story” told by the images. Of all the difficult and impenetrable post-70s Godard films, this is possibly the most challenging.