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| 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.