The Cinematheque

In an oeuvre typified by its first-person perspectives, Philippe Garrel’s 1989 meta-masterpiece, a Godardian rumination on art, love, and life, finds the French cinéaste at perhaps his most self-referential and revelatory. Garrel directs himself as Mathieu, a filmmaker unwilling to cast his wife Jeanne (Garrel’s then-wife Brigitte Sy) as a version of herself in a movie based on their lives. He instead offers the role to a better-known actress (played by better-known actress Anémone), an act of infidelity in Jeanne’s eyes. At the advice of his father (Garrel’s), Mathieu uses the couple’s five-year-old son (their real-life son and future Garrel stand-in, Louis) as a means of marital reconciliation. Trembling heartbeats, picked up by the actors’ lapel mics, add to the film’s unsparing, familial intimacies. The final, operatic crane shot complicates any sense of realism invited by the material’s overtly-autobiographical nature. A favourite of fellow post-New Wave filmmaker Leos Carax.