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Talking About Love Is Not the Same as Being in It
As usual with director Jean Luc GODARD, this film is a discourse on the tension between fact and fiction.
Here, like an ethnographer, GODARD shows a materialistic White Western world that is really a gilded cage of objects interacting in regimented leisure activities and omnipresent self-control. A realm of signs and symbols – not human beings – where the essence of things remains largely unseen (somewhat like the Matrix trilogy of science fiction movies). The alienated confront a world patched together from advertising and a media the film declares false. The world is sensed as deceptive and unreal while the perceiver refuses to undeceive himself because he lacks the cognitive tools with which to replace this sense of unease. These illusions serve to mask the realities of class, race and sex relations in the West.
Specifically, the female body is explored with the roving and desperate eye of an explorer in Darkest Africa. As if such explorations could ever yield up the secrets of womanhood for the insecure male, whose love life is predicated on objectification. GODARD tries to bring this domain of symbols to our conscious attention and, thereby, show what lies beyond them but falls into objectification himself by succeeding in the former but failing in the latter. The lovers, here, have no real relationship to one another and are simply sets of conditioned reflexes in a kingdom of physical objects. In this, the film mirrors the sense of estrangement one feels when one meets someone who is creepy because they affect the behavior of an unemotional object.
Amongst all the pseudo intellectual posing on show here it is the intellectuals who are the alienated ones; explaining why they are so good at spotting how alienated most of their bourgeois contemporaries are because it takes one to know one. This is a film emotionally crippled by its inability to get under the surface of its ostensible subject – women. It stays firmly outside while claiming men can do no other. This is emotional cowardice of a high order and, despite the film's technical cleverness, cannot be resolved into anything other than cinematic solipsism and psychological narcissism.
Here, is writ large the lingering disgust and irrational fear of women that photographing them dressing and undressing can never resolve. In its own way, this movie explains why Westernized cultures – wedded to the concept of marrying for love – have such high divorce rates compared to cultures favoring arranged marriages. Heterosexual White couples are shown as fundamentally alienated from sex, itself, and their relationships, generally – who merely go through the motions of actually relating. The deliberately bad cuts insisted on by the French censor enhance this feeling, as do such Western phenomena as books called Intimate Desires You Don't Dare Admit in Front of Women and LPs titled How to Strip for Your Husband.
The sexual promiscuity of the eponymous heroine here (Macha MERIL) is seen, by the men in her life, as solely her problem. It is not seen as indicative that her lovers are indifferent; which dissatisfaction leads her to other men. This ties in closely with the idea that White women's bodies should be objectified – to try and lessen White male gynophobic fears – by trying to make these women permanently dissatisfied with their bodies by claiming there is an ideal physique.
This abject materialism is also related to the common inability to understand right from wrong, particularly by evading the lessons of history and trying to live solely in the present. This leads to treating others as objects, too, since one has to evade who they are and how they got there; leaving only their appearance as a guide to personality.
The actors here successfully act out the parts of those acting out their lives rather than living them - capable only of need but no love; their very success making audience identification problematic. Yet, this is a blithely and amusingly pornographic movie – albeit one that cannot overcome the fallacy of Cartesian dualism.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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