First Episode: Hail Mary (1984)

1984. Probably during the first months of the year. Jean-Luc Godard was preparing to shoot Je vous Salue Marie (Hail Mary), in which he had offered me the role of Joseph. I met him late one afternoon in what was once the downstairs bar of the Hôtel du Pont Royal where I was in the habit of making dates I wanted to remain outside the Grasset [publishing house] panoptic, held 24 hours a day (or nearly that) at the Twickenham, a bar that no longer exists, once at the corner of the rue des Saints-Pères and the rue de Grenelle. Contrary to what I have read just about everywhere, the meeting went well. Maybe there were even two, very close together, I don't know any more. But the exchange was courteous, interesting, with a real debate on this moment of theological, hence philosophical history, where the prevailing monotheism, that is to say, Judaism, was pregnant with and about to give birth to its heresy, Christianity. I talked a lot. So did he. Contrary to my expectations, I found him at once witty, friendly, and surprisingly knowledgeable concerning these disputes, hesitations of mind and soul, and squabbles of which the life of Christ has been the expression and the theatre. Apart from that, I remember a Joseph as a taxi driver. A discussion concerning the Immaculate Conception in which I told him that it concerned not Mary, but the mother of Mary. Of a strange story of a belly (Mary's, I suppose) that should swell and deflate alternately during the film, in a systolic-diastolic movement. I remember as well a Godard obsessed with Courbet's l'Origine du monde [The Origin of the World], which he said he detested, warning me that he would keep it at great distance from his fable on maternity. I recall a conversation about painting in general during which he explained that, more than literature, it is the art form that is the "cousin" of cinema. And at the end, he left me with, not a script, but notes for a script that would allow me to "form an idea", he said.

I thought it over for a few weeks. At once tempted by the adventure and facing other urgent demands related to my own agenda and my books, I weighed the pros and cons, consulted my habitual "advisors" (Jean-Paul Enthoven, Gilles Hertzog, Françoise Verny) and ended up declining the offer in the letter below. The film was made, with Thierry Rode in the role destined for me. It was, in my eyes, one of the most accomplished of Godard's films during this period. I am only citing this episode and reproducing this first letter for the record, and because it entails, in short, the actual "first scene" of a relationship that would include many others. Already a Jewish scene. The Jewish fact, immediately, in all its metaphysical enormity. A prolog. Here it is.

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