The Cinematheque

New Restoration

One of the Best Films of the Decade

Sight and Sound, Film Comment, TIFF

Among Godard’s greatest achievements, the magisterial In Praise of Love also ranks as one of the best movies of the 2000s—the best, proclaims The New Yorker​’s Richard Brody. The film comprises two parts cleaved by strikingly different, stunningly beautiful visual schemes. In the first, set in Paris and filmed in velvety 35mm black-and-white, artist Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) prepares a project on the nature of love, which reunites him with a former flame (Cécile Camp). The second, shot on the Brittany coast in hyper-saturated digital video, is set two years prior and has Edgar visiting an elderly couple who fought in the French Resistance and are now optioning their life story to ​“Spielberg Inc.” An elegy to love and art; a mournful reflection on memory, history, and morality; an anti-American, anti-Hollywood screed; a dazzling display of the expressive possibilities of film and video—this is Godard at his richest, most rewarding, and most inspired.

In French with English subtitles

“Tactile yet elusive—its tragic grandeur is as graspable as running water and as shifty as smoke … Poetry is really the only word for it.”

J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

“The most elegant … feature he has made since the mid-1980s … Godard’s artistry—the way his scenes are at once archly stylized and informal, the quick precision of his eye—is unarguable.”

A.O. Scott, The New York Times