Every Man for Himself

NEW 35mm PRINT! ► Described by Jean-Luc Godard as “my second first film,” Every Man for Himself marked the legendary director’s glorious return to “mainstream” narrative cinema after a decade of low-budget Maoist works and video experiments. (Godard apparently wasn’t kidding when he had the closing title of his 1967 masterpiece Weekend declare, not simply “Fin,” but “Fin du cinema” — “End of Cinema”!) Set in Switzerland, Every Man for Himself is a characteristically self-reflexive, characteristically corrosive comic account of emotional confusion, the problems of filmmaking, and the metaphysics of survival in western capitalist culture, centred on an extended, highly provocative analogy between sexual degradation and economic exploitation. The Godardian plot has French pop star Jacques Dutronc as a dislikeable filmmaker named Godard, Nathalie Baye (in a César-winning performance) as the girlfriend who is trying to leave him, and Isabelle Huppert as a woman from the country working as a prostitute in the city. Cynical, blunt, intellectually playful, maddeningly allusive, poisonously witty, and surprisingly pastoral, the film points the way from Godard’s celebrated work of the ’60s to his remarkable late-period output of the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s. "A stunning, original work . . . Breathtakingly beautiful and often very funny . . . I trust it will outlive us all" (Vincent Canby, New York Times). “Bristles with energy . . . Profanity, perversity, humiliation, frustration, and violence erupt in luminous tableaux, painterly landscapes, and crisp Swiss city views” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 87 mins.