SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)

After working long in video, Jean-Luc Godard returned to using film with Sauve qui peut (la vie)—literally, Save His Life Who Can, but called Every Man for Himself in the U.S. and Slow Motion in the UK.
     The opening shot is of the sky; it looks fake, and the only thing moving, laterally, is the camera. The sky appears “dead,” then, purging it of metaphysical dimension. In contrast, we are introduced to author Denise (Nathalie Baye, best supporting actress César) as she rides a bicycle along a path in the countryside; a variant of this shot reappears as punctuation, associating Denise with motion.
     The protagonist is video artist Paul Godard (composer-singer Jacques Dutronc). This is the name of Jean-Luc’s Swiss father, perhaps suggesting that (as sons do) Jean-Luc had become in effect his own father. Perversely, though, Jean-Luc claimed to identify more fully with two of the film’s other characters, both female: Denise; Isabelle, a prostitute (Isabelle Huppert).
     Isabelle’s undressed derrière, which is sumptuous, figures prominently in the film. We see her bend over for anal sex for pay; offscreen, she is ferociously spanked for attempting to “go independent.” Her pimp witlessly explains to her he doesn’t want all the money she makes—only half.
     Take note: a hotel bellhop irritates Paul by professing love and a desire to bugger him. Moreover, in phone conversation with Paul, her former lover, Denise bends over, leaning on a kitchen counter. Such a visual pre-echo of Isabelle’s backdoor fuck associates one woman with the other in their shared vulnerability.
     As usual, Godard employs tiny discrepancies. For instance, Denise (if memory serves) asks a waitress what music had been played in the restaurant; but, the music having stopped and, taken up by her work and not having noticed the music, the waitress strains to hear what she mistakenly believes that the customer is listening to. Other times, too, someone asks someone else about music that’s nowhere to be heard; at other times, music either abruptly starts or stops. (Gabriel Yared’s sporadic piano score is superb.) Curiously correlating to this, Godard periodically applies video-resembling slow motion, where some activity alternates between visibly starting and stopping. The effect of these aural and visual techniques is to suggest beauty’s and human transience. Indeed, Denise’s last name, Rimbaud, and Paul’s ended marriage—the broken family includes a young daughter—likewise contribute to this aching sense of vulnerability and transience.

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OF FREAKS AND MEN (Aleksei Balabanov, 1998)

Aleksei Balabanov’s witty, sad, convoluted Pro urodov i lyudey celebrates Freudian ideas, such as the existence of the Unconscious and the driving force of the sexual impulse in (at least bourgeois) familial and social arrangements, in post-Soviet Russia, where the ban against Freud’s writings has dissolved along with the repressed Soviet state. This purposefully dreamy film arrives at its elusive vision through a back door of time, by being set in an earlier, pre-Soviet—and, as it happens, post-Soviet—city: St. Petersburg, at the dawn of the twentieth century. One could say that Balabanov, whose period piece won Nika Awards for best film and best direction, has gotten away with art—and even a murder: the surreal dispatch of a moralistic landlord: a glorious instance of Freudian wish fulfillment. In a world where, as Freud puts it, there are no accidents, the viewer must grapple, besides, with the film’s most heart-piercing moment: the seeming “accident” of one young man’s suicidal killing of his conjoined Siamese twin. This may also illustrate a wish-fulfillment fantasy as the ironical, tragic projection by one brother of his and his brother’s liberation from their heartlessly exploited condition.
     In a pre-credit sequence, the film begins with a series of sepia photographs capturing the bare-buttocks corporal punishments of grown young women by both older men and women. Photography, like the cinema it spawned, can be pornographically staged, and without due consideration paid to the sensibilities of its impressed “models,” “actors.” The film proper opens as a silent film, for cinema is as indebted to dreams as it is to photography. Balabanov beautifully reaches into the origins of cinema much as Freud imaginatively reaches into the origins of culture in Totem and Taboo.
     The characters themselves suggest fragments of a dream.

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