Every Man for Himself

Paul works for television and wants out of the city. Denise leaves him; she moves to the countryside on a bicycle and tries to write there. Isabelle has come to the city from the provinces and works as a prostitute; her clients describe what she should do and she does it. Three people touch each other and come apart again. In between the image stops, the frames advance one at a time and a single movement is spread over several seconds. Switzerland is clean, orderly and cold. Jean-Luc Godard directs. Isabelle Huppert plays Isabelle, Jacques Dutronc plays Paul and Nathalie Baye plays Denise. It is a French and Swiss co-production. Godard called this film his second first film. He had spent most of the seventies on television and video work; with this one he came back to stars, a story and thirty five millimetre. What the film is known for is the breaking up of movement; a walking person is stopped frame by frame and the viewer is forced to slow down their looking. The matter it treats is work taking hold of the body; all three characters rent their bodies to a job. The scenes of prostitution do not arouse; the instructions are given in a bureaucratic language and the scene is cold. The narrative is divided into sections and each opens with a title. The film does not offer the countryside as a place of escape. The ending leaves things in the middle and explains nothing. Its limit is access; the narrative is scattered, the characters cold, and the form resists the viewer. Who it is for: viewers who like Godard and experimental narrative. Who it is not for: it is cold, scattered, and the ending unresolved.