On Film

...she's a banker's daughter...

...Godard's mastery is clear from his economy as well...

...The camera merely shows us Isabelle with her client and then cuts to a quick shot of the street, reminding us where she plies her trade...

...Paul leaps across the kitchen table onto Denise, sending her crashing backwards over her chair...

...Early in the film, before we know of Paul's involvement with Denise, we watch her in the middle of a phone conversation that actually begins in the next shot as Paul picks up a phone and starts talking...

...He says that Cubans don't work as hard as Americans...

...When his ex-wife spurns him, he backs away apologetically, stepping off the curb, and is struck by a speeding automobile...

...after hearing a melody (not the same one that plagues Paul) that no one else around them does...

...Denise, who like Paul and Isabelle talks of leaving the city, repeatedly rides her bicycle through the lonely, lovely Swiss landscape, as if isolation and exercise could ease her malaise...

...Denise visits a Mr...

...He expands the mode by employing a whole range of cinematic devices—slow motion, freeze-frames, intertitles—that in the hands of lesser directors typically announce the triumph of empty form over trivial content...

...The fragmented narrative form of their works is disturbing because it merely obscures the content, no matter how trivial...

...To begin with, there are his patented non sequiturs...

...Person, a rather crude moniker for an anonymous John...

...He concludes: "We're not killers...

...Paul and a friend discuss how unfair it is that "mothers can touch their children more easily than fathers can," and this same desire is subsequently fulfilled not by Paul but by a client of Isabelle's...

...D espite its breathtaking facility, Every Man for Himself contains an irritating dose of the unlamented Godard of the late '60s...

...In fact, this film almost seems the precursor, rather than the successor, to the works of the German postmodernists who appeared during the '70s, particularly Peter Handke and Wim Wenders...

...When Isabelle visits one of her Johns, we are spared a tedious setup...

...we only want half the money...

...Images recur rhythmically, like poetic refrains...

...Though I have some serious reservations about the movie and the postmodern tradition it exemplifies, it is nonetheless an important work of art, a signal event in film history...

...A student at Paul's lecture, upon learning that Duras will not be attending, demands, "If she isn't coming, why can't she come and tell us she's not coming...

...Paul has about as much control over his wife and daughter, or himself, as he does over the car that hits him and sends him flying onto the pavement...

...Elsewhere, the director reverses the chronology of scenes to emphasize their continuity...

...The third is Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a prostitute whose life intersects rather oddly with Paul's and Diane's...

...Godard is right to shun melodrama, to refuse to let the audience empathize or identify emotionally with his characters...

...Since a previous meeting had been unsatisfactory for all concerned, we expect that he will be angry or even violent...

...In place of exposition, Godard has literally brought the background to the fore to show what is in Denise's background: The paradox of being forced to choose is her dilemma too, though the choice she must make is not between two men, it is between Paul and her protracted project...

...Life," Denise proclaims, is "a gesture made at a faster pace...

...There is something poignant about Godard's apparent rejection of the Marxism that held him in thrall for so long...

...A man compliments Denise for her "beautiful black hair" when it is obviously brown...

...Once more the threat of violence is transformed into comedy and resolved in a totally unexpected way, and life flashes across the screen in all its terribly messy intricacy...

...This is not a flashforward, which is usually a clumsy narrative device, but Godard's way of signaling us subliminally that Paul and Denise's relationship predates our knowledge of it —that the film depicts events in medias res...

...Handke and especially Wenders are committed to a cinema where meaning is revealed through plot and characterization...

...He looks up at Isabelle and reassures her, "She's got a hard head...

...This epitomizes how the director manipulates the rhythm of a scene to allow meaning to emerge organically...

...He slaps her several times, and the camera moves in for a closeup of her face as she reels in slow motion from the blows...

...Our expectation is heightened because Godard turns the image of Paul's running into a slow blur just before he reaches the two...

...But it turns out that Paul is seeking reconciliation...

...And Denise comments, "Castro survives because the United States and Russia permit it...

...But the detachment evident in these silly Godardisms is the cheapest of ironies...

...On the other hand, Godard has taken the postmodern esthetic further than the Germans have...

...One of Isabelle's clients is Mr...

...I won't choose," she replies stubbornly...

...Later, Isabelle answers an ad to rent the country house where Paul and Denise have been staying, and she arrives just as a quarrel they are having ends in a physical outburst...

...For instance, at the end of the movie (it would be wrong to call it the climax of the skeinlike structure), Paul by chance spots his wife and daughter on the street and rushes toward them...

...Walking along the street one morning after spending the night with Paul, who has picked her up at a movie theater, Isabelle is suddenly grabbed by two men and thrown into a car...

...From a formal point of view, Every Man for Himself represents the next logical step after the movies he made in the late '60s, so its appearance in 1980 suggests that the intervening decade was wasted...

...Heard about Castro...

...Until now, the approach has been not to call attention to the medium but to focus attention on the development of plot and characters...

...Godard's most impressive achievement is to refashion the formal tools of naturalism...

...Look, she's got tits now...

...The men are competing for the girl: "Choose, Georgina," oneof the bikers demands...

...Finally, and most annoyingly, Godard allows Paul to step out of character and comment on himself at the end of the film...

...the John exclaims as Isabelle pretends to be his daughter in a consciously arranged (and paid for) scenario that echoes Paul's conversation in a dizzying display of art imitating art imitating life...

...it could have been the impressive original of which such films as The Left-Handed Woman and The American Friend were pale copies...

...One is the director's namesake, Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), a television producer whose relationships with his daughter, ex-wife and girlfriend are rapidly disintegrating...

...Godard uses other devices to underscore the realistically random experiences of the three principals...

...Only the banks can be independent, and they're killers...

...Anticipations are oddly resolved in the parallel story lines that serve less as plot gimmicks than as naturalistic slices of unstructured life...

...To be sure, a few didactic declarations remain...

...In another scene of extraordinary narrative thrift we see Denise pedal up to a railroad station, park her bicycle and wait for the train, oblivious of two motorcyclists and a girl in the background who capture our attention...

...As the film unfolds, instead of engaging our emotions, Godard overcomes our indifference by using his dazzling command of film syntax to provide startlingly naturalistic flashes of the complexities of their lives...

...Or: "People have a hole for a mouth and empty words come out...

...In Every Man for Himself, however, Godard has for the most part achieved that elusive unity of form and content that characterizes true and lasting art...

...A prostitute in black furs and high heels incongruously appears outside a barn in the countryside where Denise is (apparently) researching her project, and inexplicably reappears at a bar where Paul and Denise are meeting...

...Paul is distressed by the voice of an unseen opera singer he alone can hear, until it mysteriously ceases...

...The suspense and frustration find their perverse resolution in an accident, the perfect metaphor for the arbitrary yet meaningful flow of the characters' existences...

...Piaget, an obvious reference to the Swiss psychologist (perhaps intended to indicate the otherwise scarcely noted location of the movie...

...One character refers to the "void of an eight-hour job," and to "the thing in man that silently screams, 'I am not a machine.'" Yet Godard also manages a few rueful digs at Marxism...

...Still, we should be grateful that Godard has rediscovered playfulness and abandoned the Marxism that, during the past decade, turned his films into strident sermons...

...All of these irritating tics are, I suspect, the director's way of distancing himself and us from his characters...

...On Screen FLASHES OF LIFE BY ROBERTASAHINA The 18th annual New York Film Festival, surely the dullest I have ever attended, was partly redeemed by the American premiere of Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man for Himself...

...A director can only undercut his characters so many times without undermining the appeal of his entire enterprise...

...We see her legs sticking out the open door as a man inside the auto, evidently Isabelle's pimp, spanks and lectures her: "No one can be independent—not the whore, not the secretary, not the bourgeois, not the duchess, not the tennis champion, not the schoolgirl...

...one character remarks...

...Present, too, are the pseudophilo-sophical musings that plague French films...

...In another sequence, Denise's path weirdly crosses that of Isabelle's...

...I initially suspected that Every Man for Himself was also pretty inconsequential...

...Suddenly the trio departs and we return to real time and to Denise...

...Another is the girlfriend herself, Denise (Nathalie Baye), whose pursuit of a vague "project" gives a rough continuity to the narrative...

...While delivering a lecture on film, Paul refers to Marguerite Duras' The Truck without naming it: "Every time you see a truck, think of her movie...

...Then there are the annoying puns and in-jokes...

...We follow the meandering misadventures of a trio of seemingly negligible individuals without, at first, having a great deal of interest in their fates...

...Throughout the film, other characters (all female) ask "What is that music...

...Lying in the street after being hit by the car, he says, "I'm not dying —my life hasn't flashed in front of my eyes...