Slow Motion [1980] [DVD]

Jacques Dutronc is violently estranged from his wife & daughter and becoming violently estranged from his girlfriend Nathalie Baye who wants to quit the city & live in the country. Isabelle Huppert is a prostitute suffering from her pimps yet acting as pimp for her own kid sister. The paths of these characters cross: Dutronc spends a night with prostitute Huppert who later, by coincidence, turns up to take the departing Baye's apartment.

Conventional wisdom has it that all of Godard's 60s films are great and that he flipped out in 68 & took a decade to make a comeback, his later films being unpopular, difficult & often exasperating. However, it may be time to reassess some of these later films, especially the two initial "comeback" films Slow Motion & Passion. DVD might be the ideal format since such films work better with repeat viewings & Slow Motion (1980) is an amazingly dense, complex film - almost every scene is full of visual & audio innovation, most obviously in the use of slow motion & stop-motion to make striking images of everyday actions (Baye riding a bicycle) & acts of violence (to very different effect than Peckinpah, Tarantino et al).

The main idea behind Slow Motion is that under late capitalism all relations - work, sexual, family - are violent power relations, epitomised by the relation of prostitute to client & pimp. It's a crude idea that runs through many Godard films. Slow Motion represents all this as absurd parody & one clue to the movie is that it was a collaboration with Jean-Claude Carriere, who wrote screenplays for Bunuel. But Bunuel's tone was always that of sophisticated wit, whereas Slow Motion is so black it ceases to be comedy in any conventional sense. Indeed the film may still be extremely offensive to many in its treatment of sex & violence (including the notorious "office" sex scene). Slow Motion is a difficult & challenging film in just about every way but undeniably a brilliant film. Fantastic acting too, especially from Huppert. As usual with Artificial Eye this DVD edition is basic, but as an extra you do get a typically impenetrable Godard cine-essay on the making of the film.

This film has had good reviews unlike some for other Godard films. This, like so many Godard films is more like a novel, where the narrative moves from one part of the whole to another with the story gradually coming together towards the end. Most films carry the story in a more linear fashion making them universally understandable, but this is not Godard's way.

Additionally, the film is shocking in its depiction of male female relationships, especially in relation to the treatment of the character of the prostitute, and here lies a curious thing. The male lead has a difficult and barely restrained relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, and shows signs of becoming increasingly violent with his girlfriend who wants to leave the city, asking him to commit himself to leaving the city or her. But, in a brief encounter with the prostitute, he treats her with something like tenderness, unlike all the other men she encounters in the film. The prostitute explains to her sister, who wants to join her in prostitution, that it is not the acts she will be asked to commit, but the fact that all of her encounters will involve men who seek only to degrade her. This point is reinforced powerfully in a scene where she is involved in a complicated sex game that demonstrates a bizarre exercise in power. This, and other depictions of women, have led to criticisms about Godard mysogeny, but I wonder if he is being a profound, if sceptical, observer of male female relationships that fail on most levels to become anything approaching the sort of behaviour we idealise and emphatically believe in.

It is as if Godard uses the vehicle of filmmaking to demonstrate the fakery both of film as a medium and human relationships as an ideal; yet he evidently loves both. A Godard film is something of a journey into the filmmakers psyche, much like the writer of a book; ultimately, this is somehow more interesting than simply watching a story on film as you get something of the person who created it; you don't usually get this from Hollywood.

It's funny that the English title is' Slow Motion' rather than `Everyman for themselves' as in America. So you get to a description of one of the film techniques rather than a description of the subject. We get the use of slow-motion to analyze and abstract the action. By slowing things down: we are seeing not just what is there, but seeing if there is something to see, the emotion, the reality behind things, space becomes time and vice-versa.. Godard has been through his experimental,avant-garde period which was highly politicised and about ideas. Now the experimentation works in harness with communication and people. There is also the juxtaposition of sound and image, selection of musical soundtrack,the playing of music at intervals in bursts; people hear it but are unsure where it's coming from. Godard is able to subtract the shot as a unit from the flow of the narrative or a sequence and mine it for peripheral detail-a kind of post-modern surrealism. There is the use of subtitles, viz :-1)Life,(The Imaginary),2) Fear,3) Trade and 4) Music, as he utilizes a formal,4-part ordering of the narration.

There is the tension he establishes between soundtrack and image. He has returned to mainstream narrative but using a free-form commentary, eg Marguerite Duras is quoted on the radio or he quotes from Rimbaud. His film is full of self-questioning(art, society,memory and identity). This complex,playful film reinvents tradition. The film is clearly the autobiographical sketch of Godard's own life that's just gone. There is the TV and video director Paul Godard, separated from his wife and daughter, arguing with his friend(Baye),who wants to leave. He is at his tether's end, is picked up by a prostitute,Isabel(Huppert).. In a lecture to students he says:" It's because I can't bare to do nothing that I do film" while smoking a cigar. Isabel moves from the country to the city to become a prostitute, telling her sister who wants to earn money quickly about prostitution,"Men want to humiliate you". She has to undergo various humiliations with her clients, some very comical. She is looking for a flat and meets Baye,taking hers. She also meets an old school friend who gets her another job,flying abroad to hotels,doing nothing and coming home. She is beaten up by her pimps and forced to say, nobody is free apart from the bankers(!!!).

Baye gives up her city job, and gets a bike, and goes to the country to write a novel and do journalism. Godard's daughter writes an essay describing the immigration of blackbirds into cities over the last two centuries. Godard is frustrated, where he finds himself paralyzed between politics and sexuality,looking for a new direction.There is a rhythm to the life depicted, a sensuality of image and a poetic framing,the movement of characters in and out of frame, in an ebb and flow with rhythmic editing and choice music, a sense of what it is to be alive every moment.Everybody is at a turning point and this is a hopeful, new direction in film.