LE GAI SAVOIR (Jean-Luc Godard, 1968)

Over three years, partially lit by the interior flame of their radicalism, two young militants, Émile Rousseau, a descendant of Jean-Jacques, and Patricia Lumumba, Patrice’s “daughter,” meet after-hours on a bare stage in an otherwise pitch-dark television studio and discuss politics and filmmaking. As witnesses, we receive from this discussion, and from accompanying recent and contemporary images and sounds, an enlightened education. The young pair teach themselves and one another, and we are collateral beneficiaries—along with writer-director Jean-Luc Godard, whose ambivalence over violent revolution is given a projective debate. The film’s title translates as Joyful Wisdom.
     Godard set this film aside in 1967 but picked it up in 1968, after the May student uprising and strikes. Initially caught up in the Leftist waves of La Chinoise (Godard, 1967), Le gai savoir emotionally expanded to include a sense of Leftist turmoil, disarray. We hear a rewinding tape recorder and recorded moments from 1968 street rallies. A substantial part of this film shows a kaleidoscopic collision of images and sounds outside the studio, testing their relationship, how they are politically manipulated, when they are “false” or “true.” Brechtian distancing devices compound Brechtian distancing devices, threatening to lose all sense of argument or coherence in a barrage of sights and sounds. But this never happens, primarily because of the actors, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Julie Berto. Léaud in particular gives an astonishing performance, which includes a simulated tightrope walk, under a clear plastic umbrella, while singing (beautifully!).
     Richard Brody is plain wrong that the “images” of them “matter little.” One of Godard’s themes is the relationship between sex and politics, and the intimacy between Patricia and Émile, with their various close arrangements vis-à-vis the camera and the lustrous brown of their heads of hair, speak to this.

THE FIRE WITHIN (Louis Malle, 1963)

Maurice Ronet brings electrifying depth and restraint to his brilliant, moving performance as an alcoholic writer who, despite the attention of sympathetic friends in Paris, can find no reason not to “leave.” Louis Malle’s humane, engrossing film ends with Alain Leroy’s suicide. “Poor Alain” (as he is repeatedly referred to), many commentators feel, spends his last day searching for some reason to live; but I see it as his veiled preparation for death—a motive Alain hides even from himself.
     Writer-director Malle’s Le feu follet updates future suicide Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s novel about another actual suicide: poet Jacques Rigaut’s, in 1929. It is steeped in the ill humors of a dead-ended life. Feeling unloved, Leroy at least found a modicum of order in the Versailles asylum at which his estranged wife, who lives in New York, paid to have him “cured” of his drinking habit; now the private hospital has set him loose. Leroy starts drinking again; someone at a party informs him that his wife plans on divorcing him. We do not know whether the comment is accurate; but either way, in tandem with other receptions, it impresses on Leroy his vast vulnerability.
     Quick shots of Alain from alternate perspectives suggest in one scene his interior commotion and his being at odds with himself. In one amazing passage in a public washroom, Alain weighs a homoerotic encounter as a possible way out of his dilemma.
     Le feu follet is full of exceptionally fine feeling—although emotional illiterates who come armed with smug quips (“Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem”) had best stay away—from this film, from all people except their own limited kind.
     One of Alain’s former lovers (Jeanne Moreau, wonderful): “I should never have let him go.”