Je vous salue, Marie (1985) - film review

Mary, a student who plays basketball and works in her father’s petrol station, discovers that she is pregnant, even though she has not slept with any man.  Her boyfriend, Joseph, a taxi driver, can hardly believe that she is both pregnant and a virgin, but must learn to love her from a distance.

As would be expected for a film that openly purports to present an up-dated version of the Biblical virgin birth, Je vous salue, Marie created a storm of controversy when it was released.  The Catholic Church vehemently denounced it for its perceived blasphemy, and there was almost equal condemnation from a substantial number of film critics who derided its apparent pretentious conceit.

The only thing that can be said categorically about this film is that it does not deserve the amount of attention it has received.  In style and content, it is scarcely different from the other films which Godard made during his post-Marxist return to commercial film-making in the mid 1980s.  All of the films which he made in this period, which include Détective, Passion, Prénom: Carmen and King Lear, are abstract, free-form films, inspired by previous works, which place the role of the image way above that of narrative, characterisation and dialogue.  The result is indeed a new kind of cinema, but one which excludes the majority of cinema goers and often irritates with its pretentious self-congratulation as much as it impresses with its innovative flair.

With that in mind, Je vous salue, Marie can hardly be considered (as some  have stated) a landmark film.  It does occasionally impress with the quality of its camera work (one area where Godard cannot be faulted), but the lack of focus, the muddling of so many Biblical references, the wooden acting, the lack of a single coherent purpose simply makes the film slow, plodding and irritating.  It is a film with a deeply spiritual underlying plot, and the realisation of a young woman that she is pregnant, whether she is a virgin or not, has so much potential.  Yet, the depth of Godard’s intellectualism (and Godard is probably the most intellectual film maker the world is ever likely to see) prevents this from being a truly spiritual film, robbing it of its humanity with its interminable (and irrelevant) philosophical posturings about the origin of life.  The film can best be described as a flawed work of genius, like so much of Godard’s later output.


© James Travers 2000

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