The Cinematheque

“Beautiful, terse, perplexing, allusive as it is elusive—and a stunning experience.”

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

GODard and DeparDIEU (the film’s marketers had great fun) team up in the ravishingly photographed, spiritually beguiling Hélas pour moi, an exploration of ​“the desire of a God to feel human desire.” Riffing on the Greek myth of Alcmene—in which Zeus impersonates Alcmene’s husband Amphitryon and seduces her, conceiving Hercules—the film has a modern-day Swiss schoolteacher (Laurence Masliah) discovering that her innkeeper husband (Gérard Depardieu) suddenly speaks with the voice of God. Godard’s metaphysical inquiry takes in the distances between men and women, the sacred and the profane, humanity and nature. As ever, his approach is brilliantly iconoclastic, visually and aurally luxuriant, literate, essayistic, funny, and occasionally infuriating! Hélas pour moi rivals Hail Mary as Godard’s most spiritual work.

In French with English subtitles