User Reviews

This is a beautiful, but unknown, short film by Jean-Luc Godard, which the filmmaker directed at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios in 1981, when he was filming 'The Bottom of the Heart'.

Coppola was the one who financed the short, which cost just US$30,000.

However, Godard only finished the short in 2006.

The short features the participation of the great Italian director of photography Vittorio Storaro and the Russian filmmaker Andrei Konchalowsky.

Konchalowsky reads a text about the French impressionist painter Paul Cézanne regarding artistic creation, in which the French painter said he wanted to make the invisible become visible.

Godard critically shows the creation of an immense scenario, with many professionals involved, to reproduce, in Cinema, the painting 'Le Nouveau-Né' (The Newborn), by the French painter Georges de La Tour.

However, in the end, Godard makes it clear that it is not necessary to do something monumental to create a beautiful work of art, as he only uses a candle and two actresses to reproduce, in a beautiful way, the painting by Georges de La Tour .

This is still a kind of direct message from Godard to Francis F. Coppola, as if the master were saying "what's the point of spending so much money, when it is possible to obtain even better results with so little?" ?'.

This is one of Godard's most beautiful short films, but unfortunately it is little known. For those interested, the short is available on YouTube.

Three great curious things about this short: director Andrey Konchalovskiy plays a film director who makes a re-reading from a Cezane painting and the whole setting is on a film set moments before the shooting of a scene begins; the whole set feels like having a massive budget unlike any of Godard movies and the reason for it comes from Francis Ford Coppola, one of the many investors of Godard's "Passion"; and Coppola's regular cinematographer at the time Vittorio Storaro plays himself here, while finding the perfect way to compose a shot. A multi-lingual film set with plenty of challenges but one common goal: to make a good film.

Since there's no captions you might struggle a little with some parts from the film since there's English, Polish and French being spoken - gladly, I caught some translated comments that explained a little of what I missed. However, the experience of watching "Handyman" (whoever plays that role here since there are so many crew people appearing here and there that it's hard to know) feels a little empty afterwards. Where's the magic behind the creation? Very reduced and very dark to be seen - though the set showing an old fancy hotel and the lights moving mysteriously are all amazing.

And I'm gonna have to thrown some wood on the bonfire of controversies: wasn't JLG who managed to destroy his great friendship with Truffaut after critising "Day for Night"? We all know the story of how much he complained about it in a lenghty letter/review of his friend's film telling how phony and unrealistic the makings of movie were portrayed in that movie. Well, for the little Godard shows here, you can sense that the behind the scenes isn't all that much of a perfect collaborative effort. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's all about hard job to be made even when artists disagree with each other.

And if "Handyman" was in fact a documentary following a film being made (it never was, anyway) then we could give some credit of this being an interesting behind the scenes picture. It's manageable but it's mostly empty and soulless. I tried hard to enjoy, I really did. 5/10.