FOR EVER GODARD

By RICHARD CORLISS

Two nude corpses lie on a beach. Then someone quickly covers their bodies: the man's with a tuxedo, the woman's with a formal red dress. It seems a restoration of dignity after death, but it is only the rough bustle of filmmaking: the corpses are actors, and they must get dressed for the next shot.

This scene, from Jean-Luc Godard's poignant, invigorating For Ever Mozart, lasts only a few seconds--yet it serves as a surreal image, a joke and a requiem. After 40 years, Godard can still astonish and amuse in the cinematic shorthand he virtually created. Now two of his films, both about moviemaking, are on view: the 1995 For Ever Mozart and Contempt, his 1963 meditation on sex, lies and celluloid, newly restored after long being out of theatrical circulation. So it's time to praise Godard for what he was and still is.

His early films--Breathless, My Life to Live, A Married Woman, Masculine- Feminine--were acerbic love stories set in Left Bank cafes, sketches of men and women rubbing each other raw, arguing, smoking, drinking, anecdoting their lives away. The scenarios, rambling and aphoristic, could have been scrawled on napkins; their emotions were spiked with absinthe. Films poured out of Godard, two or three a year, and each was an incendiary device--an event for his admirers, an affront to the cinematic status quo. Andrew Sarris called him "the analytical conscience of the modern cinema." Because of Godard, it seemed, movies would never be the same.

Thirty years later, movies are samer than ever--more conservative, more in the thrall of spectacle and sensation. And Godard...is he still around? In fact, he made 15 films in the '80s, nine more in the '90s. A man in Mozart says, "There's no such thing as grownups." Godard, who'll be 67 this year, still has the intellectual energy--the need to know and show everything--of a precocious child.

Contempt is hardly Godard's best or most evocative work, but it exposes his feelings for the seductive lie of movies: that "cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires" (the same line is quoted in For Ever Mozart). A French playwright (Michel Piccoli) is hired for a rewrite job by an American producer (Jack Palance) who has eyes for the writer's sexy wife (Brigitte Bardot). With its polyglot cast and mixed-doubles leering, Contempt gets the Babel and Babylon of filmmaking down perfectly.

The film's own behind-the-scenes story is also instructive. When producer Carlo Ponti saw the finished film, he was upset at the absence of Bardot nudity. Godard then shot the famous opening scene, of Bardot asking Piccoli if he likes her eyes, breasts, ass--a catalog that commercializes her body, just as Ponti demanded--and Piccoli replying that he loves her "totally, tenderly, tragically."

Godard has always been a canny guerrilla. He knows that film is an expensive art, that someone must subsidize his midnight raids on the prevailing culture. So he subverts the typical narrative by using all the handsome old tools. Contempt has movie stars, guns, car crashes, wide screen, beautiful color, the cliffs of Capri, the most rapturous music (by Georges Delerue, his violins sawing and soaring like Philip Glass in ecstasy). And, always, pretty women. A Ziegfeld of the Left Bank, Godard reinvented Jean Seberg and discovered Anna Karina, Juliet Berto, Maruschka Detmers, Myriem Roussel, Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy--glories of Gallic cinema. In Contempt he saves Bardot from cheesecake notoriety. She's smart, sensitive, brutal, doomed.

"War is easy," says a woman in Mozart. "It's sticking a piece of metal in a piece of flesh." Moviemaking, though, is hard. Here a crew is in Sarajevo to film an adaptation of Alfred de Musset. The Bosnian war, its carnage everywhere evident, is reflected in the rancor of the filmmakers. An actress must try, hundreds of times, to say the word oui correctly; the accountant refuses to sign any more checks. At the end of the war, and the end of the century, are we near the end of our rope? One man thinks so. "When I look at the sky," he says, "I only see what has disappeared." This could be Godard, musing on an art form near exhaustion. Yet he gives the lie to this cynicism in scene after scene of dark beauty. Could he be not the Picasso of cinema but its Mozart?

Toward the end of For Ever Mozart, a kid standing in line for the movie we have just seen hears the plot and says, "Let's go see Terminator 4." But Godard's films are worth seeing for his encyclopedic wit, the glamour of his imagery, the doggedness of a man who won't give up on modernism. His crabby films are, in truth, breathlessly romantic--because he keeps searching for first principles in the pettiest human affairs. Godard gazes at the intimate and finds the infinite.