Jean Luc-Goddard's film is so unlike a conventional plot-driven movie that it is hard to imagine how he conceived it. You almost imagine that he started out by making a conventional movie, got stuck, and so chopped up the footage into a thousand pieces, which he then redistributed at random. In fact, the mood of the piece is far too carefully controlled for the film to have been made in this way, but it is a confusing mix: half shot in black-and-white, half in a vivid colour (altohugh it's hard to correlate the style of cinematography to a time-frame within the story), the face of some of the characters is deliberately not shown, and a fragmentary story about Catholics in the French resistance and the attempts, sixty years later, to make a film about this, is interspersed with lengthy philosophical meditations from the characters. What can be said is that the images and music are tied in perfectly, the words hold a certain interest (although there is a degree of pretension in them), but the narrative as a whole never coalesces. What's left is like a master's primer in how to create an atmosphere in film; intriguing, but not wholly satisfying as an end in itself.
Review of In Praise of Love
