Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39938 in VHS
• Released on: 1999-10-26
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Formats: Color, NTSC
• Original language: French, German, Polish
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 88 minutes

Amazon.com
Jean-Luc Godard's 1982 film about filmmaking, art, life, and love is an often stunningly beautiful work about a Polish film director (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) re-creating in tableaux vivant some masterpieces by Goya, Rembrandt, El Greco, and others. While Radziwilowicz's director is criticized by his film's backers for lacking a story, a number of actual stories take place among the characters working on the film--yet Godard keeps them all at enough of a distance that they can't take over his deconstructed narrative. As he often does, Godard calls upon the elements of filmmaking (and, for Passion, painting and classical music as well) like forces of nature, and then arranges them so that their powers are their very point. Passion may not be one of those ordinary, lightly accessible valentines to the art of making movies, but it has more fervor for the form than most directors could ever feel. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

Strange, surreal, often wonderful.
This is a semi-autobiographical film about a Polish director making some tableaux vivants of clssical works of art, some of which are amazinngly beautiful. Contrasted with these are the mundane elements of his private life. It owes someting to Truffauts Day for Night, but being Godard, it's infinately more complex and ambiguous. My favourite scene takes place in factory, where someone asks why you nver see factories in movies. Vintage Godard!

Passion
This film was made well into the (seemingly) third phase of Godard's career, with his more linear narratives occupying the 1960's and his overtly political films (including his work as a member of Dziga Vertov) comprising much of the 1970's. Less didactically Marxist in tone (perhaps due to disillusionment), the third "postmodern" period consists, roughly, of the 1980's through the present. Although "postmodern" is an agreeably irritating modifier for this period, since the term is thrown around with more randomness in current social theory than is deserved, it is appropriate for this period--and its appropriateness explains why it has been received with such animosity, as evidenced in other reviews in this page. In other words, if you are expecting the tone and the linear constructions of, say, Breathless or A Woman Is a Woman, you are likely to be (angrily) disappointed.

Admittedly, all of Godard's films could easily be considered postmodern (or at least, high-modern), but the last period, in which Passion may be situated, best exemplifies this "tendency." The "plot" (if it may be called one) is threadbare and beside the point. The construction is disjointed. The tone is ironic and self-aware. The themes are, largely, theoretical and often focus on the nature of art itself (and film, in particular). In short, the film is an affront to all modernist expectations in film. That is, a person who would ask half way through the film, "What is going on?" is looking for elements of film that Passion does not have to offer.

It is easy to cast aside a work like this, condemning it to "pretentiousness" or self-indulgence, but it is important to remember that it is film (and television, of course) that has been the only "prominent" art form to evade change: Today's commercial successes and even critical favorites follow pretty much the same formulas as films in the 1930's. There have been minimal efforts, by and large, to stretch this medium beyond these limits. Godard is one director who has consistently attempted to challenge the traditional narrative form and to explore less familiar territory.

On to the film Passion itself... The rough outline consists of a director (Godard-like) attempting to make a decidedly uncommercial films featuring "re-enactments" of famous paintings. As might be expected, the financial backers are none too thrilled about a sluggish, aimless production by a neurotic director. Meanwhile, a factory-worker (Isabelle Huppert), with whom the director is having a relationship, attempts, unsuccessfully, to organize a revolt among her co-workers, and a desperate, self-effacing hotel owner (Hanna Schygulla) similarly forms an attachment to the director--perhaps as an only means of escape from her otherwise dreary existence. (It is interested to note that Schygulla also appeared in Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore, a film also about a creatively-impotent director working under disastrous conditions, but beware of Beware of a Holy Whore: it is a shrill and thoroughly bad film that seems a little too derivative of Godard's later style to be taken seriously.)

All in all, Passion is a successful film. It insightful (and ironically) connects disparate themes (e.g., the factory worker's fight for her very livelihood, and the director's struggle to bring about his "vision"). Despite the comic elements of the film, the overall impression one takes from it is a sort of empathetic frustration at passions left diverted or unfulfilled.

Zero Stars For Dull
Do not listen to the film buffs who call this "art" and a series of vignettes that defy any meaning, its worthless and boring. The whole film has no interest to offer, what it tends to portray is stuffy French poseurs who smoke and talk about nothing in particular, that isn't very entertaining. I was dragged to the ending finally and was exhausted by the absolute uselessness of this picture and of Godard himself who isn't a very capable film director.