Hail Mary (1985)
Original title: Je vous salue, Marie
The French director explores the relationship between soul and body, two realms that overlap on the absolute horizon of the relationship between transcendence and immanence, fully aware of how difficult it remains to integrate them into contemporary thought.
by Renato Butera
“En ce temps là” (In those days) announces a recurring title card throughout the film, an irregular antiphon that introduces nothing but immerses you in a biblical atmosphere of religiosity. These irregularities are characteristic of one of the inventors of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard, with his interrupted, disturbed, unnatural sounds, in a constant asynchronous in-and-off rhythm. The setting is modern: 1980s Geneva, captured in the anonymity of its suburbs and a lake recognizable only by the car license plates.
Awarded at Berlin, Hail Mary [Je vous salue, Marie] turns forty. In Italy, it was accused of blasphemy for touching the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. The director tackles an extremely delicate subject for the Catholic Church’s theological considerations and for popular devotion. The provocation was strong and led to notable acts of reparation. Let’s clear up any doubts immediately: Je vous salue, Marie is a representation of the “Gospel according to Godard,” a personal interpretation by the Calvinist-raised director.
The film tells the story of a girl who plays volleyball, loved madly by Joseph, who is willing to do anything to be with her, even endure the violent reprimands of a rather unconventional Archangel Gabriel, who arrives by plane to announce Mary’s virgin pregnancy and advises Joseph to treat her with respect and sacrifice. “I don’t know anyone,” responds the girl, a conscious expression of her virginity and her desire for love, of which she has only seen “the shadow of a shadow.” To find her path as a mother, Mary must be tough, strong, and pure. But love cannot be dismissed, whether it comes from God or from a persistent fiancé who agrees to marry her despite the mystery of her pregnancy.
Mary has always desired that something important would shake up her life. The virgin conception, confirmed by a skeptical gynecologist and accepted by Joseph, who increasingly leans toward chastity out of love, is the awaited event. But at the same time, it’s unbearable because it makes her life tumultuous, and she grows restless with the impulses of her young body, which she must suppress in acceptance of a proposal that has made her a “servant” against her will. “I am the virgin,” she will say once her maternity is realized, “but it wasn’t my choice.” However, this didn’t stop her from strengthening her soul to be one. In fact, conscious motherhood makes her more of a woman, more generous, and more open, to the point of rediscovering a more mature femininity.
Joseph, on his part, transforms his stubbornness into a willingness to be a father, working on his passions and emotional reactions (his “faults”) that Gabriel and the little girl accompanying him have noted in a notebook, instructing him to improve them. Mary also helps him respect the female body, especially when faced with her nudity as a pregnant woman (as seen in the hand that tries to touch her bare belly, and her repeated refusals), or to understand the “strangeness” of a child destined to deal with the “matters” of an invisible Father, to whom Joseph ultimately becomes a surrogate.
The film features two other characters who do not cross paths with Mary. There is only a brief encounter with Joseph, who works as a taxi driver and will take them to the station. The two are a very young girl named Eva and a professor, a scholar of theories about the origins of the world. Their story runs parallel to that of Mary and Joseph. Their relationship is born from the allure of knowledge and ends when the professor collects the blossoming femininity of the wealthy young student, seduced by the allure of his theories about earthly life.
Their bond extinguishes after consuming the fruit of betrayal, signified by the apple, whose meaning refers to the early chapters of Genesis. This parallel is not secondary at all, as it allows the director to express his thoughts on the origins of the world and humanity. Everything unfolds like a betrayal between a man and a woman, indicating the betrayal between living beings and the “ordering Intelligence” whose love, profoundly generative, “wanted, desired, foresaw, ordered, and programmed life.”
Viewed from a forty-year distance, and with adequate critical detachment, Je vous salue, Marie is a film in which an intense personal reflection of the director emerges, a reflection that pushes thought and proposal to the limit of challenge. A reaction would make sense if the provocation were vulgar, devoid of cultural and religious roots, if it used sacred themes gratuitously, with superficiality or, worse, with contempt. Le Mépris is the title of one of Godard’s most iconic films, one that helped modernize cinematic language. In both films, female corporeality is the enzyme of the narrative. They share a disjointed mix of images and sounds loaded with strong symbolic meaning, and the modesty of the protagonists’ bodies.
The French director explores the relationship between soul and body, passion and purity, two fields that converge on the absolute horizon of the relationship between transcendence and immanence, spirituality and materiality, fully aware of how difficult their integration continues to be in contemporary thought. What interests Godard is the investigation based on the first part of the Ave Maria prayer; the second part does not attract him, nor does it belong to him, as it pertains to Catholic devotion in which he does not recognize himself, having been raised in the Calvinist tradition, whose Mariology does not embrace all the truths of the Catholic one in which we were educated.
Cinematografo, April 26, 2024
