Hélas pour moi (1993) - film review

At a Swiss lakeside resort, a book publisher investigates a mysterious tale.  The story goes that a god-like being entered the body of a man, Simon, to experience physical love with his wife, Rachel.  Did this actually happen or is Rachel just covering up her infidelity to Simon?

This film is a modern retelling of the famous Greek legend where the god Zeus assumes human form to seduce a mortal woman by impersonating her husband.   As the film’s gentle introduction suggests, through a simple parable, this is a film which explores the disturbing and profound issue of what human existence is for in a godless universe.

This is certainly not Godard’s most accessible film and it would be easy to dismiss it as confused, incoherent nonsense.  There is no strong central narrative, all of the principal characters are eerily detached and underdeveloped, and some of the quirky Godardisms (such as the voice of the mysterious god-like being, reminiscent of the computer in Alphaville ) are a little off-putting.  Despite that, this remains a strangely fascinating and profound work of cinema which further confounds the enigma that is Jean-Luc Godard.

This is probably one of those films which you have to watch at least five times to appreciate fully.  But, for the patient, it is a film worth seeing.  It broaches themes which are major concerns for society, indeed for humanity, themes which have growing importance as our world becomes more mechanised and atheistic.  Human existence has some meaning - must have some meaning – but in a universe where there is no God, where mankind has the power to explain so much, what can that meaning be?  It is a question which this film scarcely begins to answer, but it is all the more remarkable for what it does manage to say, because so few other film directors are prepared to venture down this avenue.

© James Travers 2000


In the post-WWII period of flowering democracy, of material prosperity and secular spirituality, people were proud of rituals of mutual tolerance and development of scientific knowledge.  But closer to the end of the century, with the growing uncertainty and unpredictability of life and enlarging opportunities to make easy money outside the West (and with the influx of foreigners, represented in the film by Zeus’s entourage), something new happened with the Western soul and Godard was very quick to register it in Oh, Woe is Me.

What happened is the intensification of interest toward the supernatural (super-human) power.  People started to think not about God (they always were believers) but about God’s power.  They even started to feel the power of (human-made) technology as a super-human might - for example, as we see in the film, the passing ship puts many into a fascinated stupor, the passing train activates in some a cartoonish iconoclastic reaction, or the talking pin-ball machine mesmerizes not only characters but also viewers.  

Inflated interest toward the super-human energies is equally noticeable in different social strata (the literature professor is fixated on finding in poetic texts the taste for super-human perfection, as Rachel Donnadieu, a parishioner and wife of a garage-owner finds super-human aura in her prosaic husband Simon).  People’s fixation on technological toys helps the growth of their new pseudo-theological sensitivity.

Rachel’s husband Simon also cannot resist, during his business trip to the Far East, this new self-aggrandizing feeling.  Is Simon starting to feel himself as Zeus and decided to surprise his wife by suddenly returning to her as God, or has Zeus incarnated Himself into poor Simon, to spend the night with Simon’s loyal wife?  We are not supposed to expect any help from Godard on the level of the plot - objective realities are always ambiguous because they are partially produced by human feelings and human perceptions, we unconsciously participate in creating phenomena we perceive as belonging to external world.

Godard’s unbelievable film is like life, impossible and natural.  Woe is Me helps us not only to understand better our own complexes (and be astonished by another side of our everyday life) but to get a new perspective on our epoch, which is changing in the direction nobody knows.

Read articles dedicated to films by Godard, Resnais, Bergman, Pasolini, Cavani, Bunuel, Kurosawa and Bertolucci at: www.actingoutpolitics.com
© Victor (Seattle USA) 2010


Oh, Woe is Me is the third film of Jean-Luc Godard’s mytho-religious trilogy: Contempt (1964), Hail Mary (1985) and Oh, Woe is Me (1993).  It is the second film of the trilogy that deals with pagan imagery, the middle film Hail Mary analyzing Christian belief.

In Contempt, Godard uses Homer’s Odysseus as a springboard in an attempt to imagine Odysseus/Ulysses’ destiny in the West of the 60s.  Godard stylizes the movie-camera and projection-camera as mythological monsters.  He personifies the god Poseidon/Neptune as an American film-producer, vis-à-vis the main character as a modern Odyssey/Ulysses overburdened by the necessity to keep gods (including his own wife) on his shoulders.

In Woe is Me we have a deal with Zeus/Jupiter as the image of an unconscious megalomaniacal identification on the part of a small businessman. Godard takes us to the heart of people’s psychology which they blindly project outside them by forming today’s cultural trends.  We are overwhelmed with Godard’s endless witty and funny examples of the growing taste for association with and being close to super-human powers masked as human, and of superstitious worship of technology among today’s population.  

We observe on the screen people’s irradiating irrationality and how it triggers our prejudices and makes us in 20th/21st centuries psychologically very close to the ancient creators of Olympus. Godard shows that we react to technological power just as ancient Greeks perceived Dragons, Cyclops, Hydras or Centaurs, and that, like them, we want and are trying to be as powerful as Gods.     

Read the article about Oh, Woe is me - A New Paganism of the Worship of Technology Intensifies Human Superstitions at: www.actingoutpolitics.com.

© Victor Enyutin 2010

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