Philip French loves writing on cinema, but it’s been a long time since he actually said anything. Once you realise that his reviews in The Observer are mostly a dogged refusal to include anything outside of a chunk of trivia, followed by a description of the plot, you can potentially squeeze some enjoyment out of him—it must, presumably, take effort to say nothing at all. His remembrance of Breathless is another puzzling example. It makes me think that French’s true home is not the film review, but rather the introduction. Or perhaps the press release.

For nearly 40 years I’ve been convinced that whenever a Godard movie is shown at Cannes, everybody in the world interested in seeing it is present at the Palais du Festival, elbowing other critics aside as they struggle to get into the early-morning press show. Nowadays, I only see a new film by the aloof, hectoring, didactic Godard when wild horses turn up at my front gate to drag me to a London press screening.

What?

It’s interesting that French has seen fit to write a hapless ‘where did it go wrong?’ piece about the septuagenarian Godard, who for some reason turned beyond the critic’s ken to “low-budget pictures, most of them on video”, implicitly suggesting that very little beyond the ’60s is worth writing about (although this could be unintentional—French doesn’t write about anything). This is both demonstrably untrue—Godard returned to the mainstream, on his own terms, in the ’80s—and (this is mean) an act of displacement.

Why was I thrilled when Truffaut, as the director in his La Nuit américaine, eagerly tears open a parcel of books on the cinema, one of which is a symposium on Godard containing my 1965 essay on Une Femme mariée?

French can’t really say that Godard’s powers have diminished, because that would involve more than trivia, but he has, I suggest, picked the ‘where did it go wrong?’ mode for a reason.

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