Hail Mary (Cohen Media Group/Trailer image via YouTube)
The controversial Hail Mary is more devout than controversial.
From the first supernal image of rain on a green field, Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary (Je vous salue, Marie) approaches the mystical with a sense of radical awe. The first inter-title — “At That Time,” rather than “Once upon a Time” — begins the Passion Play by implying credulity and to make its story of the virgin birth contemporary.
It is Godard’s sense of humor to present Mary (Myriem Roussel) as a teenage girl who plays high school basketball and works at her father’s gas station. Her boyfriend, Joseph (Thierry Rode), drives a cab. The Annunciation occurs when the angel Gabriel (Philippe Lacoste) flies in on a jet plane, and the young couple’s romance becomes a philosophical discussion about trust, desire, restraint, and faith.
Every scene is a test — of belief, plausibility, modern faithlessness. And every image (shot by Jean-Bernard Menoud and Jacques Firmann) is astonishingly beautiful. Hail Mary reaffirms Godard’s perfect visual pitch. His gift for composition, pacing, and sublime color matches his keen wit and curiosity, which means this is an unmatched Christmas movie, among the most serious ever made.
At the time of Hail Mary’s release in 1985, Pope Jean Paul II criticized it, saying the film “deeply wounds the religious sentiment of believers,” a perspective that misses Godard’s genuine, respectful exploration of those sentiments. It is a worldly man’s movie, but that man is also an artist who complicates and transcends convention.
Godard’s intellectual approach never turns skeptical. His visual wit engages the phenomenon of human experience so that ideas associated with the Christmas story enrich scenes of modern behavior. The immanence that Robert Bresson sedulously achieves in his own religious, existential films bursts out in imagery so vivid, sharp, and clean, it almost sparkles — especially when a Dvořák scherzo bursts into the innovative soundtrack, accompanied by exterior street noises, followed by a sensational sunset or moonlight shot.
Hail Mary represents a new phase in Godard’s development toward poetic abstraction and spiritual contemplation. His 1980s comeback, after a decade of Marxist-collective wilderness experimentation, was aesthetically rejuvenated. He makes Mary, Joseph, and Gabriel as youthful and ardent as his ’60s icons (Belmondo, Seberg, Karina, Léaud), adding an Eve figure (Anne Gautier) in a subplot about infidelity, and Juliette Binoche in her film debut as Mary’s rival. But these youths discuss faith instead of politics. Mary’s agon is a struggle to accept her blessing: “Are we resigned to being loved? I am a soul imprisoned by a body. My soul makes me sick at heart, and it is my c**t. I am joy and need no longer fight it.” Joseph deals with masculine longing: “Men think they enter a woman,” and a male gynecologist (Georges Staquet) examines Mary, only to realize: “I’ve always wondered what we know about a woman, and I found that all you can know is what a man already knew: There’s a mystery there.” It’s classic French New Wave tempered by Godard’s Mariolatry.
Decades earlier, Godard explained, “I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form; only instead of writing, I film them.” In Hail Mary, he returns to the essayistic style of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, focusing on the erotic subject of A Woman Is a Woman, but here adding a profound meditation on the divine. Nature shots (including a close-up montage of flower pistils) intersperse Mary and Joseph’s struggle, revealing a pantheistic contemplation of God (a view Godard would extend in his 1990 masterpiece, Nouvelle Vague).
It’s during the bedroom discussions on following the Voice or heeding the Word that Joseph pantomimes touching Mary’s extended belly, and Godard here conflates the physical and spiritual (evoking the quintessential bedroom scene of Breathless). Hail Mary was part of that heady moment in ’80s cultural theory when Scritti Politti’s love song “The Word Girl” simultaneously queried “How your flesh and blood became the word!”
A foreshortened nude shot evoking Andrea Mantegna’s painting The Lamentation of Christ and references to Friedrich Hölderlin’s 1805 poem “Patmos” and to Julien Green’s biography of St. Francis all give meaning to earthly experience. (Eve and a tow-headed student playing with a Rubik’s Cube, and a hypothetical lecture on extraterrestrials by Eve’s lover-professor might be cosmic ripostes to Spielberg’s 1982 E.T. )
Kino Lorber and Cohen Media’s Blu-ray reissue of Hail Mary surpasses the disrespectful, nonreligious fare of most year-end releases. Godard uses all his sophistication on a subject to which intellectuals often feel superior. The infant’s swimming-pool baptism; a Jonah-and-the-whale game between mother and child; the young boy renaming his friends Peter and James and then declaring, “I am who He is. I must tend to my father’s affairs” — these are like scenes from a Sunday School pageant. Godard’s final signature is a quick-rhythmed montage of a woman’s leggy strut in a skirt that rouses worshipful contemplation of gender and its signifiers. Godard boldly puts sex and faith in proper proportion. Hail Mary is both more profound and more playful than a biblical epic from Hollywood.
