Oscar-winning French director Michel Hazanavicius on making fun of Godard in Redoubtable – and losing friends to radicalism

When Michel Hazanavicius’ black-and-white silent comedy The Artist (2011) became a global box office hit and won five Oscars (including best picture and best director), the world of politics seemed – to this French director at least – to be in a marginally better place.

After his follow-up effort, the Chechen war drama The Search (2014), disappointed both critically and commercially, Hazanavicius returned to what he does best with Redoubtable.

The comedy is his latest ode to old cinema after a popular pair of 1960s spy film parodies (2006’s OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and 2009’s OSS 117: Lost in Rio) and, of course, The Artist, his homage to Hollywood’s silent film era.

Redoubtable, which is currently screening in Hong Kong cinemas after premiering at the 46th Hong Kong French Film Festival, may appear at first to be no more than a bittersweet account of the romance between French New Wave legend Jean-Luc Godard and actress Anne Wiazemsky in the late 1960s.

Hazanavicius says he tried to make fun of the Godard character and create audience empathy with him at the same time. “Even if I make fun of him, I try to portray him as a human being. Sometimes because he’s the great Jean-Luc Godard, we see him as a concept,” Hazanavicius tells the Post in an interview in Hong Kong, his first visit to this city.

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But Redoubtable is also meant to be more than a humorous look at the early life of the notoriously confrontational Godard – now 87 and still making films – whom Hazanavicius has still yet to meet or even hear any word from. “The film is not just about [the Godard character]. I think it deals with some serious topics as well.”

He says the “real topic” of Redoubtable is radicalism. In the film, which is set partly during the May 1968 civil unrest in France, Godard is seen disowning his early classics, rejecting the industry that has been idolising him, and embracing a socialist form of filmmaking that essentially ended his iconic run of “funny movies”, as characters in the film put it.

“I think we can make fun today of an intellectual who turned Maoist [as Godard did]. We can say, ‘Come on guys, it is ridiculous’,” Hazanavicius explains. “Nowadays, a lot of very intelligent people are becoming very radical in the way they’re thinking. When you talk with them, you don’t talk any more, you just listen to their monologues.”

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Hazanavicius considers himself “left wing in a very traditional way”, and is concerned as much by the increasing influence of the alt-right as he is by the rise of the extreme left, which some of his friends have joined in a “dogmatic” move. “I have a lot of friends, we used to agree on a lot of things, but they’re not open-minded any more,” he says.