Jean-Luc Godard’s so-called “second first film” isn’t really a patented return to zero, even if it does betray flashes of modern and postmodern references to Breathless. Techniques honed on video crop up throughout, and the tone is clearly that of an older, more experienced person instead of a peevish wunderkind. Drawing from frequent comparisons of the director to James Joyce, Every Man for Himself isn’t a reset so much as it is the start of a Viconian cycle, a spiral of history that repeats the same basic motions over and over but is nonetheless pushed forward by the slight alterations of each previous arc on the subsequent one.
Where Breathless situated itself around a young man’s cinephilia and immature sexual understanding (itself significantly informed by movies), Sauve qui peut (la vie) is more open and measured, as evidenced by a first shot that blissfully scans a pale blue sky laced with wispy columns of clouds that resemble natural contrails. Godard also takes aim at the chauvinism of his early work, directly linking himself to the lead, TV director Paul (Jacques Dutronc), with whom Godard shares a surname and a profession. Paul is a vision of what Belmondo’s Michel might be if he grew up, got his shit together, and went corporate: he’s a sexist, arrogant fool, but his sense of freedom is limited by work, and he is no better at understanding the responsibility and shared emotional labor of relationships any more than Michel.
Godard further upends the old dynamic by giving voice to the women in Paul’s life, letting them be their own, independent characters with desires and personalities rather than subordinates to the man’s self-perception. Paul’s ex, Denise (Nathalie Baye), dominates the first segment as the camera follows her around the French countryside where she’s retreated from him as well as unfulfilling TV work and searches for a new sense of purpose in rural life, while Isabelle Huppert plays the enterprising sex worker Isabelle, a woman with far more depth than the director gave his first depictions of sex workers. Where Godard previously viewed prostitution solely through a social lens that degraded women for money, here he lets Isabelle take control of her work, showing her to be a shrewd businesswomen who works alone despite threats from male pimps who control her territory and even conducting a job interview with her younger sister who’s also interested in joining the trade.
Godard trades the freewheeling invention and existential dourness of his first feature for a cooled sense of sardonic humor aimed as much at his own presumptions as anything else. The director mocks the years he spent touring college campuses to show his radical projects to students with a scene of Paul delivering a guest lecture to a classroom of visibly bored kids, his provocative blackboard scribble “Cain and Abel, Cinema and Video” doing nothing to rouse even the slightest interest in discussion.
Later, Paul receives long-overdue punishment for his misogyny and vanity with an ending that suggests the conclusion of Breathless as executed by Jerry Lewis, a slapstick pedestrian collision made even funnier by super-slow-motion. The film’s most raucous scene, though, belongs to Isabelle, who shows up to service a film producer client who makes hyper-specific demands of her and another sex worker, along with the producer’s male assistant. The scene mocks the disgusting nature of film executives, as well as the notion of the “creative” executive. And despite the man’s bluster and control, Isabelle still asserts her will, demanding to use his phone to check in on an apartment she wishes to rent, in part, with the money she’ll make that night.
But the pervading feeling of the film is uncertainty. Godard’s return to the lush detail and commercial backing of true theatrical filmmaking coincided with the West’s entry into the reactionary, consumerist 1980s, and Every Man for Himself directly concerns the transition of radicalized ‘60s youth into capitalist members of the workforce. Paul talks with a friend who mentions that their peers claim a new Cuban staff doesn’t work as hard as the Americans who previously worked with them, and money dominates every discussion. Though Godard pokes fun at himself through Paul, he clearly feels more attuned to Denise, whose physical retreat to the countryside mimics Godard’s own ostensible regression from modern video back to traditional film. Far from a step back, however, the film shows the director exploring new realms of aestheticism after largely forsaking it during the ‘70s, and his use of slow-motion to call attention to small gestures and preference for natural and diegetic light prefigures a poetic quality that would creep into his late work. It’s no mere fancy that Godard’s credit says “composed by” rather than “directed,” a distinction that provides the clearest indication of where he would go over the next 35 years.
A/V
Godard devotees are no stranger to wildly variable levels of video quality when tracking down the director’s post-Weekend oeuvre, from a recent spate of high-quality Blu-rays all the way down to atrocious rips of VHS tapes for movies that were lucky to even come out on that format. But Criterion’s work on the director’s lush return to cinema is nothing short of a public service, restoring the full beauty of the film’s poetic images. The care taken in capturing natural light can now be fully appreciated for the natural glow of a lake reflecting the sun, or the verdant, coniferous growth along that water’s banks. Flesh tones are natural and the detailed cinematography retains the texture of each actor’s face. The film glories in the majesty of the quotidian, and it has never been easier to appreciate its sumptuousness. The mono soundtrack is an even greater godsend for those of us who have listened to degraded, high-generation tapes of late Godard; its clarity and lack of errors reveals the depths and contrapuntal layering of his sound design, well before he made the full leap to stereo with King Lear.
Extras
Godard provided video accompaniments to most of his ‘80s films, interlinked essays that often became legitimate works of philosophical and technical exploration in their own right. Scénario de “Sauve qui peut (la vie)” is less abstract than the videos that followed, but its straightforward use of superimposed images, collage-fabricated storyboards and Godard’s explanations of plot and theme all work toward an unorthodox goal: to make a screenplay itself out of images, all the better to privilege the vision of cinema above all. Colin MacCabe provides an exceptionally cogent video essay on the techniques Godard brought to Every Man for Himself, while new and archival interviews with cast and crew provide anecdotal experience of what it was like to work with Godard on this revitalizing project. Godard appears in his legendary back-to-back appearances on The Dick Cavett Show, where the normally astute, generous host largely made a fool of himself baiting Godard’s perceived pretension and largely does not know how to handle the director’s evocative responses. Godard 1980, an experimental film about the director, is also included, as is a booklet with an essay by the great Amy Taubin.
Overall
Jean-Luc Godard’s late period has lasted the majority of his working career, and it has consistently challenged and beguiled those willing to seek it out. Criterion exceeds even their usual standards by making such a crucial feature in the director’s filmography widely available at last, to say nothing of the fantastic transfer and copious extras that round out the package.
