by William S. E. Coleman
I am writing this two days after the recent IMPA and ISA film festival. A great deal was said about the difference between mainstream and independent low budget films. Even more was said about experimentation and extending the boundaries of film as an art form.
Jean Luc Godard’s Oh, Woe is Me (Helas Pour Moi), the opening film of the festival was, to me, chaotic, willfully obscure, filled with disconnected ideas and concepts, and—well, let me put it this way, it contained everything that makes Godard an overrated filmmaker. It clearly illustrates his hope that there are 10,000 people in this world that understand him. That attitude doesn’t belong in a public art form.
I question any work of art that has to be explicated so that a person of reasonable intelligence can understand it. I don’t mind obscurity and ambiguity, or even mystery; but I believe an audience has to feel, or sense, there is an overriding reason for the existence of a work of art. With Oh, Woe is Me, I saw a director indulging himself in undigested ideas while he was trying to intimidate me into believing he is profound. This is akin to throwing a bucket of paint at a canvas and declaring it is great art.
I had to take Rob Treganza’s word that Depardieu was Zeus, even though the character is referred to as God again and again. I hardly see two thugs lifting a young woman’s dress as representative of Hermes. We have to take a friend’s word that this is what Godard really meant. Oh, Woe is Me is a jigsaw puzzle with no matching pieces, a key that opens no door. It is the ramblings of a disordered mind.
There was one exciting idea in the film and that was thrown away: If the husband of the wife who has experienced the immaculate conception doesn’t believe in God, what happens? Godard lacks the guts to pursue this exciting irreverence. I could go on, but space is limited. Instead we are left with random, unrelated images and references. None are gathered into a statement of the human condition.
Godard, instead, throws away the marvelous French ability to take a simple idea and render it universal, a tradition that reaches back to Voltaire and finds its ultimate brilliance in Candide. His peers did just that. Resnais’ marvelous Last Year at Marienbad probes the very nature of perception and reality. Truffault finds a basic character and spends a great deal of his creative life moving that character through the world he lives in—a world in which we also live.