Product Description

From Jean-Luc Godard, possibly the most influential European film director of all time comes IN PRAISE OF LOVE, a mesmerizing and lyrical meditation on love, and the role history and memory play in shaping human consciousness, past and present.

Structured in two parts, the film opens in Paris, where the young artist Edgar is developing a project on the four stages of a love affair- meeting, sexual passion, separation. and rediscovery. During the casting process, Edgar discovers a beautiful young woman who he is convinced he has met before. In the second part, set two years earlier, Edgar interviews an elderly couple- former Resistance fighters during the war- only to find that their memories are being bought up for a Steven Spielberg blockbuster. Linking the two parts is Edgar's relationship with the enigmatic woman he met and re-encounters.

IN PRAISE OF LOVE is a combative but tender work that stubbornly asserts the importance of love, art and memory. A film of great intellectual freedom, elusive meanings and overwhelming visual beauty, Godard has never seemed more young, fresh and original.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55534 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-07-22
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Black & White, Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Amazon.com
Forty-three years since the release of À Bout de Souffle (Out of Breath), Jean-Luc Godard has still got it. And like his first film, the English title (in that case, Breathless) incorrectly represents the essence of this intricate work. "In Praise of Love" suggests a joyous celebration, but in actuality, Éloge de l'Amour (Eulogy for Love) is a meditation on life, love, and particularly loss. The 2001 film is highly reminiscent of Godard's films from the '60s in structure and attitude. On the surface we may be watching the making of a film (similar to Le Mépris), but in actuality, we are deep in the exploration of love's melancholic elements. In the typical Godard style, In Praise of Love's essence is told through its characters' conversational criticisms towards art, literature, philosophy, politics, capitalism, and cinema, all displayed through the unstructured use of digital video that has the director's distinct, rebellious look and feel. It is amazing that at 73 Godard still has the capability to successfully redefine how we look at film. In Praise of Love definitely requires repeat viewings and may not be for everyone, but for those interested it is well worth it. --Rob Bracco

From The New Yorker
The new film from Jean-Luc Godard is carved into two halves. The first is in gliding, rapturous monochrome, the second in angry color, all the more jagged for being shot on digital video. From that contrast springs the whole endeavor. Godard is caught, as so often, between elegy and protest-between a lament for certain ideals, private and political, and splenetic digs at prevailing cultural conditions. There is a story-we follow a dour sort called Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), who is himself trying to cast a movie on the subject of changing love-but the narrative is so diluted that you can't help sensing Godard's indifference to the fates of his characters. Instead, his passion seems to be given over to chastising Hollywood for its abuse of history; America at large also takes a beating, apparently on the ground that the place is not old enough. (What exactly is any country supposed to do about that?) Yet the work, like most of Godard, asks to be seen; its strains of regret tug at you, and hang around in the mind, with a persistence rare in more coherent pictures. In French. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Philosophically, Metaphorically , Visually Beautiful Film
Jean-Luc Godard has once again created a wholly unique cinematic experience in his IN PRAISE OF LOVE. The film requires participation (yes, even work) on the part of the viewer, but the contents of this art piece are so refined and so significant that it begs for repeated viewings, much like the major novels of history. His technique of telling his 'story' is idiosyncratic: there is a narrator who is at the end of a ten-year love affair and wondering why it ended. He states at both the beginning and end of the film that a love afair is in four stages: meeting, sexual passion, separation, and rediscovery. And in exploring the impact of the miracle of love he proceeds to investigate memory and history and how they are inextricably bound in our perception of the world both past and present. To present his case the narrator begins to cast a film to explain his story and selects at least one young girl to play the lover, only to have her blend into the fabric of the remaining of the film just the way glimpses become pieces of memory - distorted, illuminated, altered, reinvented by our present and our past. Much of the film is shot in luminous black and white and then the latter portion is altered by the introduction of color. But in the color portion the fields of color are manipulated into bands of brilliance that are at times artificial, at times precise. An elderly couple is interviewed, homeless people populate portions, making derisive comments on society and especially capitalism, the streets of Paris are there for wandering: Godard free associates visually and philosophically and leaves us with so many beautiful thoughts and phrases and images that one viewing of this film simply cannot suffice to capture them all. Our 'present' as a viewer will be altered by our 'history' of having watched the film before. "When I see a new landscape, it is not really 'new'(it has been there forever) but it is new to us because we relate it to landscapes and places that compose our past". IN PRAISE OF LOVE is a journey inside the mind of Godard and as such it only whets the appetite for more. A beautiful, if difficult, film for people willing to engage.

A Poetic Essay
If you only know Godard from his 1960's films this late phase masterpiece will come as a surprise. In Praise of Love could just as well be titled In Praise of French Culture as this film is like a testament to all of the things Godard loves most about his countries cultural traditions. We know Godards taste in philosophy, music, literature, painting and most importantly film because his favorite sources decorate every frame of the film. References abound within the film to Robert Bresson -- who I think could well be called the patron saint of French Cinema. The New Wave film makers were always fond of Bresson but here Godard not only shows a young man standing in front of a movie poster for Pickpocket but he also quotes from Notes of a Cinematographer-- this book provides wonderful insights into Bressons mind set but also Godards who obviously reveres him . There is also a moving reference to Vigo's L'Atalante. The Godard of the 90's is a much matured artist less concerned with shaking things up than with learning how and teaching us how we must look backward and remember in order to move forward. The view of an aging artist yes but also the view of a mature artist.

The first half of In Praise of Love is shot in black and white and the most memorable shots are of Paris at night -- the cinematography is achingly romantic which is fitting for the first halfs main theme is the search for romantic love. It is misleading to say this is the only theme though as while that theme is explored Godard also speaks of the current state of France and through his actors offers his insights into the modern state of French public life and politics which obviously leave him cold -- ie the state has no love for its people, and, anyone who makes over 10,000 francs a month in France no longer has a political conscience. As he films his young actors you can tell Godard is reminiscing about his own youth and own first love Anna Karina. For Godard politics are never far from love -- the two seem to go hand in hand for him -- because the search for love is intimately connected with our search for an ideal. Love will always fail, Godard seems to say, because we can never achieve our ideal of it -- or, searching for the ideal we cease to see the object that we love. In support of this examination of the early stages of love by a young man he offers an older gentlemans memory of his first love and how the memory of it still stings him. The film has a decidedly documentary feeling and a decidedly somber tone which is reinforced by the elegiac piano music. Though the narrative is not strictly linear it is fairly easy to follow. In addition each time Godard quotes one of his cherished sources (Chateubriand, Balzaz, Bataille's Blue Noon) the book is usually in the frame. The Godardian methods will be familiar to someone who has only seen his sixties work but you will also notice that those methods have mellowed, deepened, and become more intimate, and furthermore the pace of his films has slowed considerably reflecting the directors age and this is actually a welcome nuance as it allows one to absorb the content of each sequence. I am tempted to say I prefer this late phase of Godards career to his early phase but of course one would not exist without the other.

In the second part the main theme shifts away from love, although that continues to be a minor theme, and towards history -- in truth the two themes are interrelated and comments made about one topic invariably have significance for the other. Memory becomes an obsesion for the aging artist and Henri Bergson is a major reference point in this section of the film. Godard argues that until nations are willing to confess their crimes and own up to them and allow for open discourse they will remain in a kind of infancy. National identity and growth is dependent on memory and thus America is ridiculed for failing to have any kind of memory. In fact in the funniest part of the film a representative for an American film company is in France trying to purchase the rights to a resistance fighters memoirs. Godard has a character comment that America has no memories of its own and thus must buy them from other countries. America is seen to be suffering from the worst case of arrested development but France is also seen to be guilty of it as well.

The film is a rich essay with many themes which complement each other in unusual ways. I found it moving and thoughtful and infinitely rich -- at any given moment you will find yourself contemplating a particularly evocative reference which connects the past to the present. This is the kind of film you like immediately and the kind of film that invites you back to it. There is much here and I've only hinted at some of the things I noticed on a single viewing but I plan on watching this many more times.

The best film of 2001...another great Godard film
I really love this film. Like most of Godard's best work, it yields itself to repeated viewings (I have seen it now 4 times) because it is such a rich work, including so many ideas (on language, love, memory, Paris, America, poverty, and of course cinema). The film is very much like a novel in that each scene is imbued with more and more layers one on top of the other. Highly complex, original, and intelligent cinema is hard to come by nowadays, so thank you Jean-Luc for making movies for INTELLIGENT people.