7 - Nouvelle Vague

Summary

Me, my memory, I can't help it. I would if I could, but I can't forget anything…. Of course, there are things I would like to remember, but….

–A Married Woman

The controversies over Hail Mary brought Godard's name into public view more prominently than at any time since Breathless. Indeed, his debut feature never achieved such widespread fame – or infamy, some would say – despite its importance to film history.

Nonetheless, the Hail Mary brouhaha did little to shore up his highly uncertain status as a commercially viable filmmaker. Audiences who had lost interest in him during the period between Le Gai Savoir and Here and Elsewhere found subsequent pictures like Numèro deux and what some critics call the “trilogy of the sublime” films – Passion, First Name: Carmen, Hail Mary – almost as rarified and demanding as their highly politicized predecessors. Dètective, the fractured thriller-comedy made to raise money for the completion of Hail Mary, gained an international release but satisfied few moviegoers except the diminishing band of Godard enthusiasts. This is ironic, since Dètective might have been a crowd pleaser with its snappy title, genre-film plot, and big-name cast including Nathalie Baye, Claude Brasseur, Jean-Pierre Lèaud, Laurent Terzieff, and Johnny Halliday; but as a viewing experience it proved little more accessible than Sauve qui peut (la vie), one of the comeback pictures that (like Numèro deux before it) seemed designed to challenge rather than seduce everyday moviegoers. Unsurprisingly, they did not rise to the challenge.