EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF Movie Review

Slow Motion
Sauve Qui Peut
Sauve Qui Peut la Vie

In 1967, Jean-Luc Godard told a film critic: “To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can't be separated.” Then why must so many of Godard's critics try to do precisely that? By the time Every Man for Himself—his 1980 portrait of modern sexuality in an emotionally frozen world—was released, much of the critical world had already given up on Godard as a once-great pioneer who had in recent years gone off the deep end with political diatribes like Wind from the East, Tout va Bien, and Letter to Jane. Yet with Every Man for Himself, a beautiful and eloquent film that focuses—however despairingly—on a marketable topic (“Topic A,” as Preston Sturges referred to it), the critics were jockeying to be first in line to declare that “Godard is back.” America may not have wanted to see Godard's takes on Vietnam as the war continued to drag on, but sex was another matter and Every Man for Himself, which is just as elliptical and elusive in structure as some of his earlier films, became a major art house event, complete with “Francis Ford Coppola Presents” featured over the title in the film's American advertising. Don't get me wrong, however—I'm hardly complaining about its PR (though I wish that more of his films had received the same treatment), for this is one of the funniest, most beautiful, and most deeply disturbing films of Godard's career. Set in the cold, symbolic neutrality of Switzerland, the three loosely intertwined plot threads tell of lovers who manipulate and control each other with varying degrees of passion and disgust, and for very different reasons. (A businessman's precisely choreographed “scene” with a prostitute is one of the more appalling and brilliant depictions of joyless, power-centered sexuality in cinema history.) Often hard to follow and maddeningly fragmented, it is also so rich that you leave the theatre with your priorities realigned. For better or worse, the work of a genius. With Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, and Jacques Dutronc.

NEXT STOP … Contempt, Passion, First Name: Carmen

1979 87m/C Roland Amstutz, Nathalie Baye, Jacques Dutronc, Isabelle Huppert, Anna Baldaccini, Monique Barscha, Michel Cassagna, Nicole Jacquet, Paule Muret, Fred Personne, Cecile Tanner; D: Jean-Luc Godard; W: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Claude Carriere, Anne-Marie Mieville; C: Renato Berta, William Lubtchansky, Barnard Menoud; M: Gabriel Yared. NYR