A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search This Blog

Sunday, May 24, 2026

Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)

Jacques Dutronc in Every Man for Himself

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye, Cécile Tanner, Paule Muret, Anna Baldaccini, Roland Amstutz. Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Renato Berta, William Lubtchansky, Jean-Bernard Menou. Art direction: Romain Goupil. Film editing: Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville. Music: Gabriel Yared. 

Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man for Himself is about transactional lives: Everyone in the film is trying to get something from someone else. Naturally, the key figure is a prostitute, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who eventually gets involved in the lives of a couple dissolving their relationship: the filmmaker Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) and his girlfriend, Denise (Nathalie Baye). It's a droll, talky, and sometimes bitterly funny film with a melancholy undertone reinforced by several reprises of the aria "Suicidio" from Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda. For the real-life Godard it represented a return to more or less conventional filmmaking after the late '60s and '70s immersion in politics and experimentation, and it shows his mastery of creating vivid characters with problems of their own self-centered making. 

Posted by
Links: , ,