Ghost Sonata

By RICHARD CORLISS

Ghost Sonanta

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF Directed by Jean-Luc Godard Screenplay by Anne-Marie Mieville and Jean-Claude Carriere

For two decades, Jean-Luc Godard has been cinema's master of collage. His films assemble scraps of dust-jacket wisdom, revolutionary rhetoric, sexual aggression, the music and the language of the streets, images from books, TV, magazines and billboards, forming a mosaic that melds the graphic wit of a Braque guitar with the anarchic intensity of a kidnaper's ransom note. In Every Man for Himself, the first Godard film to be distributed in the U.S. since 1972, he has tried to make an accessible movie while still speaking in his steely, ironic voice. But Godard will not be compromised. The collagist keeps us at a distance. The movie screen is impenetrable.

Until 1960, film was primarily a representational art. Then Godard and his fellow iconoclasts suspended disbelief like a taut high wire across which his characters danced and ambled, and sometimes fell off. There are "people" in Every Man, including a TV producer named Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), his co-worker and ex-mistress Denise (Nathalie Baye), and her friend Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who works as a prostitute and has a short session with Paul. But they are not "real people." They are figures in the desolate landscape of Godard's mind. They have materialized to illustrate his deepest, bleakest conception of man and woman: the childish brute and the soul survivor.

What propels virtually every Godard male into treating women as a caveman would a woolly mammoth? Is it fear or loathing? Every Man is a catalogue of bestiality. A seedy businessman orchestrates a four-person roundelay of sexual degradation. A man casually asks Paul: Have you ever thought about sodomizing your eleven-year-old daughter? Later, Paul verbally flogs the girl with sexual epithets.This is man, Godard is saying; I am man.Give credit where it is due: Godard has no fear of exposing himself on film. "Paul Godard" (his father's name) is an admitted self-portrait, a skull with the mandible still moving, and serpents slinking out of the eye sockets.

The Godard female has often been a prostitute. She expresses his vision of every man-woman relationship, and serves as a metaphor for the personal film maker in a tawdry art-industry. But Isabelle, in Every Man, exists simply to endure: to suffer the indignities of venal clients, and to survive with her mystery intact. She is a modern, unsentimental version of the silent-screen innocent who is noble not because of what she does but because of what men do to her. She is touched -- indeed, pawed and probed -- but never moved. And that is her revenge on the male of the species.

The credits announce that this is "a film composed by Jean-Luc Godard." Every Man is shaped in the form of a sonata, with thematic variations expressed through recurring images and lines of dialogue. But this is a ghost sonata, and the specter is that of the old (young) Godard, the director of Breathless and Weekend, who dazzled cinephiles with his visual fecundity and youthful wit. His new film, however confessional, seems clinically detached. Its heartbeat is irregular and indistinct, like signals from a dying star on the other side of the universe.And its message for the human race seems to be: every man for himself, and Godard against all.

--By Richard Corliss

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