General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

In Praise of Love

In Praise of Love (Éloge de l'amour) is a 2001 drama film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, a French-Swiss co-production that premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2001.¹^•² It was Godard's first feature in competition at Cannes in more than ten years.³ The film tells a story of love, memory, and history in two contrasting halves: the present, shot in black-and-white 35 mm, and the past, shot in saturated color on digital video.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	Éloge de l'amour, 2001, France and Switzerland¹
Director and writer	Jean-Luc Godard¹
Festival	In competition, Official Selection, Cannes 2001²
Running time	97 minutes (Cannes lists 98 minutes)¹^•²
Lead cast	Bruno Putzulu (Edgar), Cécile Camp (Elle), Jean Davy, Françoise Verny¹
Visual structure	Present in black-and-white 35 mm; past in saturated color digital video⁴
French release	16 May 2001, distributed by ARP Sélection¹^•⁵

Spoilers

Synopsis

The film is built around a "project" whose author, heard at the start but not seen, describes the four key moments of love: the meeting, physical passion, disputes and separation, and reunion, shown through three couples of different generations, young, adult, and old. It is never made clear whether the project is a play, a film, a novel, or an opera.⁶^•²

The present. Edgar (Bruno Putzulu), a filmmaker, is preparing this project and auditioning actresses for the lead. He tracks down a woman he believes he has met before, but she refuses him outright, and he learns that she has died.⁴^•⁷

The past. The second part moves back two years. Edgar, visiting an elderly couple who were in the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation, meets the same woman, then a trainee lawyer. Her grandparents have asked her to examine a contract offered by Americans who want to buy the film rights to the old couple's story of the occupation; the Premiers Plans festival synopsis states that Steven Spielberg wants to make a film about the couple. In the course of the evening a heated discussion breaks out about the United States, Hollywood, and the Second World War.⁴^•⁸

Visual form and structure

The film is formally and narratively cut into two acts, with a strong caesura that is at once narrative, temporal (an ellipse of two years), and visual.⁹ The present-tense passages are shot in black-and-white on 35 mm, recalling Godard's New Wave films of Paris streets, while the past is rendered in oversaturated color on digital video.⁴^•⁸

Reversing the convention. Godard explained the choice in a 2001 interview: he did not want to treat the story chronologically, and he deliberately worked against the accepted convention of showing the present in color and the past in black-and-white, as in newsreels. He said he wanted to find a way of intensifying the past, and cited Proust: when Proust writes of Albertine in the imperfect tense, the reader experiences it in the present. "I think that colour is closer to us because it's the present tense of film projection, emotionally speaking," he said.³

The digital passages push the video medium's own texture to the surface. In a car sequence shot on DVCAM, colors are oversaturated into flat color fields and the digital noise is strongly visible in the darkness of the night interior; one shot of the speedometer shows the interlacing artifacts characteristic of digital tape recording, placing the viewer before the recording medium itself rather than a transparent representation of reality.¹⁰ Critics have described the two halves as two textures: the black-and-white images fluid and viscous, the color images dry and flat, a difference some read as the visualization of two mental states rather than merely a change of technology.¹¹

Production history

The film had an unusually long development for Godard. From 1996, under contract with Canal+, he worked on the screenplay about the four moments of love. In 1999 he shot interviews with young people and elderly women, and the scenes in Brittany. Between shooting and editing he made a short film for Cannes, acted in a film by Anne-Marie Miéville, and edited a compilation of the Histoire(s) du cinéma he had just completed.⁸ In an interview he recalled that he had first imagined telling the story de-chronologically, beginning with the end and working back to the beginning, then mixed in police-story elements, which he called a disaster, before arriving at the idea of the couples' story.⁶

Production companies included Les Films Alain Sarde and Périphéria, with producers Alain Sarde and Ruth Waldburger; other credited production companies across sources include Arte France Cinéma, Canal+, Vega Film, Avventura Films, and Télévision Suisse-Romande.¹^•⁷ The music draws on David Darling, Ketil Bjornstad, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Arvo Pärt, Georges Van Parys, and Maurice Jaubert.⁵^•⁸ A book of the film's phrases, Éloge de l'amour: Phrases, was published by P.O.L in Paris in 2001.¹²

Themes and reception

Godard's recurring concerns of history, memory, politics, and love return in the film, told achronologically and with many side paths.¹³ A Film Quarterly review argued that the film's disjointed structure drives the viewer to perceive non-linear connections between its elements, associating its critical account of the contemporary West with the forgotten and compromising truths of the Holocaust and fascism.¹⁴ The film's references to the Drancy tramway stop, the site of the transit camp from which Jews were deported from France, tie its critique of buying and selling history to the occupation period.¹¹

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 54% Tomatometer from 72 reviews and a 63% audience score from more than 1,000 ratings; the site's critics consensus calls Godard a challenging filmmaker with admirable ambition but finds the film too self-indulgent to engage beyond his most patient fans.¹⁵ Individual reviews ranged widely: Amy Taubin in the Village Voice compared the film to a late Beethoven chamber work, while other critics found it hermetic.¹⁵ The International Film Festival Rotterdam program, by contrast, called it a fresh and accessible film with which Godard again managed to surprise the film world.⁴ A 2022 retrospective assessment places In Praise of Love among Godard's late genre-bending works that present dazzling images and sounds while criticizing the loss of historical awareness in contemporary culture.¹⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026