An experimental essay-film from Paris-based Iranian director Mitra Farahani, See You Friday, Robinson documents an extended online conversation between two aging cultural icons, Franco-Swiss nouvelle vague pioneer Jean-Luc Godard and Iranian author and film-maker Ebrahim Golestan. Farahani’s guiding conceit is that these two revolutionary artists should have met in the 1960s, but fatefully they never did, their lives progressing like parallel lines that never intersect. To redress this inexplicable cosmic error, she persuaded both men to engage in a slow-motion long-distance email collaboration, exchanging messages every Friday over a 29-week period in late 2014 and early 2015.
The resulting correspondence is scrappy, whimsical and not hugely revelatory, which may explain why it is only just surfacing in finished feature form seven years later, But there are enough amusing asides and teasing insights here to please indulgent fans of both men. Screening in Karlovy Vary this week, this rarefied cineaste confection is firmly pitched at connoisseur art-house and festival crowds, but the enduring cachet of Godard in particular should generate modest buzz. The film’s biggest beneficiary is arguably Farahani herself, who followed this project by producing Godard’s most recent documentary The Image Book (2018), with which it shares some stylistic similarities
Typically, Godard mostly sends Golestan cryptic collages of text and image, with nods to Matisse and Goya, Beethoven and Shakespeare, all interspersed with deliberately goofy animal clips just to add mischievous ambiguity. Golestan greets these antic puzzles generously, on camera at least, calling Godard “knowingly playful” and likening his linguistic trickery to James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake. “There is a certain pretentiousness to his work,” he winks.
As ever, Godard remains a stubbornly elusive screen presence. When Golestan sends him some direct questions gently probing his enduring faith in cinema, the slippery Gallic trickster shuts him down with a comically blunt video response. “No offence Ebrahim, but these are the sort of questions the police ask,” he quips, staring into the camera with his best deadpan Buster Keaton frown. A quietly hilarious, revealingly unrevealing moment.
Even so, Godard disciples will learn more about him from Farahani’s film than from most of his rare media appearances over the last 20 years. In extensive video footage, some of it self-filmed, we witness the dishevelled, unshaven auteur in off-duty domestic mode, mooching around his charmingly modest house in Rolle near Lausanne, tidying the kitchen, playing with cats, chomping on cigars, drinking red wine diluted with mineral water, and so on. Even if this humble image is partly staged for the camera, the teasing notion of Godard as reality TV star is an enchanting one.
By striking contrast, Golestan is more of an old-school man of letters, living a life of quasi-artistocratic opulence in a grand 19th century Gothic mansion in the English countryside, his home for the past 40 years. Farahani clearly had more direct access to her fellow Iranian than she had to Godard, and keeps filming Golestan even after the email experiment ends, even including footage of his 99th birthday party last year. Shots of autumnal leaves blowing around the grounds of his house have a sublime, lyrical quality.
But Farahani’s artistic sympathies are obviously closer to Godard, who she adoringly calls “a worrier of history”. At one point, when the French director is hospitalised with heart problems, she begins to fear he may die. It would be like “losing a protector,” she tearfully explains, along with all the beauty that Godard has created. With touching, poetic, grandfatherly wisdom, Golestan reassures her that “beauty never ends, it just changes hands.”
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Out of the Past)
Cast: Ebrahim Golestan, Jean-Luc Godard, Mitra Farahani
Director, screenwriter, producer: Mitra Farahani
Cinematography: Daniel Zafer, Fabrice Aragno
Editing: Yannick Kergoat, Mitra Farahani, Fabrice Aragno
Production company: Écran Noir Productions (France)
World sales: Écran Noir Productions
In Farsi, French, English
96 minutes
