“Arguably, more question marks hung over the prospect of Redoubtable than over any other film in Cannes this year,” begins Jonathan Romney in Screen. “One reason was the idea of Michel Hazanavicius, director of the world-beating The Artist, seeming too mainstream a talent to take on a story about so radical and heavyweight a figure as Jean-Luc Godard. Another was that advance stills of Louis Garrel as Godard suggested the mother of bad hair days. And yet Redoubtable turns out to pretty much merit its title. It’s a dazzlingly executed, hugely enjoyable act of stylistic homage, but also the poignant story of a dysfunctional marriage and an insightful recreation of a critical and contradiction-ridden period of modern French history. Only hardcore Godardians—a pretty unforgiving bunch—would reject it out of hand.”
“Godard-worshipers and Hazanavicius-skeptics should keep a couple of things in mind before sharpening their pitchforks,” advises Nikola Grozdanovic at the Playlist. “Firstly, the film is a comedy and any analytical inspections of something deeper and more meaningful will only end in scrunched up bits of frustration. Secondly, it’s not really about Godard. It’s not a biopic, nor a commentary on his universal cinematic influence. The film is based on Godard’s ex-wife Anne Wiazemsky’s novel Un An Apres (A Year After) and focuses on the rise and fall of the couple’s marriage. In essence, Hazanavicius has gone back to being a film geek who plays in his harmless sandbox with subjects that are not way over his head, crafting—for the most part—a pretty delightful popcorn movie for other film geeks.”
For Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, the “surprise of Redoubtable, which turns out to be a lightly audacious and fascinating movie (if not exactly one to warm your heart), is that though it is, in fact, structured around Godard’s marriage to Wiazemsky, its real subject is his life as an artist—in particular, the way his relationship to filmmaking got turned on its head during the crucial period of late 1967 and ’68, when he was drawn into the national spasm of protest that was May 1968 and became obsessed with ‘revolution,’ to the point that he shed the skin of the filmmaker he’d been in his glory days.”
“This movie simply takes it as read that a film about Jean-Luc Godard cannot function without Godardian pastiche and Godardian in-jokes,” notes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “So there are many visual and stylistic homages to the great man: quirky slogan-ish intertitles, distancing tricks, 60s furniture, jazz, advertising, and entranced shots of a woman’s naked body . . . Hazanavicius is also pretty unsparing and unsentimental about the ugly, charmless and narcissistic side to Godard. Desperate to out-radical the students who might mock him, the posturing Godard raises the issue of Palestine at a packed meeting and declaims that ‘Jews are the new Nazis’: a fatuous shock-tactic which is received in icy silence.”
Redoubtable’s Godard is “a 38-year-old abrasive jerk with an enormous chip on his shoulder,” writes Barbara Scharres at RogerEbert.com, while “Anne (Stacy Martin) is seen as the thoughtful but adoring child bride . . . This is a film that has an ax to grind,” and Scharres argues that the “question becomes who is self-serving here.” At the end, the narrator, presumably Hazavanicius, “declares that the Godard who once held him enthralled has died for him too, leaving him liberated to be his own artist.”
More on the ending from the Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy, who notes that it “shows Godard reluctantly relinquishing the director’s assumed autocratic control of a film (Wind from the East) in deference to the collective decisions of the entire crew, is rather disturbing in that it essentially suggests that Godard committed creative suicide with his break from the past, a notion with which his most ardent champions would take great exception.”
At Cineuropa, Fabien Lemercier argues that, as an adaptation of Wiazemsky’s novel, Redoubtable’s “point of view is therefore the simultaneously lovestruck and lucid gaze that this young Philosophy student turns towards her illustrious partner, which allows the movie to sketch out the myriad facets of a glamorized creator in the midst of crisis and, at the same time, a simple man in a relationship. And its success is made all the sweeter by the ‘soap bubble’ style (in the proper, joyful sense of the term) of the mise-en-scène, which alleviates all of the weighty seriousness that a more conventional approach would have entailed. And this is precisely how Hazanavicius manages to make his gamble of offering a Godard-like freedom to the whole pay off—in other words, it’s the best way to pay an offbeat, affectionate and caustic tribute to such an emblematic figure in the history of cinema.”
For IndieWire’s Eric Kohn, “the main triumph of Hazanavicius’s film is that it makes the heavyweight auteur human.”
“Some people probably think me telling Godard’s story is blasphemy,” Hazanavicius tells Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian. “My friends were worried. But he’s not my hero or my God. Godard is like the leader of a sect and I’m an agnostic.” Hazanavicius says Wiazemsky almost turned him down until he mentioned that the film would be a comedy: “She said, ‘I think it was a funny relationship and a funny time.’”
Variety’s Elsa Keslassy asks Hazanavicius about Godard’s response to the project: “I let him know that I was making the film from the first day of preparation, and sent him the script, but didn’t hear back. I also invited him to a screening of the movie ahead of Cannes but he didn’t come. I’m not surprised, and there are no hard feelings on my end. To me, he’s one of the five to eight directors who changed the history of cinema.”
And, talking to the Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel, he adds: “I am expecting something very harsh in my direction. I expect it. I’m prepared for it. I called my parents and I said to them, ‘Don’t worry. He might say something very, very personal.’”
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