Amusing, waspish take-down of Jean-Luc Godard: Redoubtable reviewed

Jean-Luc Godard’s famous dictum was: ‘all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun’. In Redoubtable, French director Michel Hazanavicius’s jaunty biopic of Godard, set during the student insurrection of 1968, which premièred yesterday at Cannes Film Festival, there is plenty of the first and none of the latter. The girl is Anne Wiazemsky, Godard’s teenage bride and one-time muse, who wrote an elegant memoir of their time together, Un an après, which is the basis for Hazanavicius’s film.

Wiazemsky’s role is taken by French-English actress Stacy Martin who reveals almost as much flesh here as she did in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Though, it must be said, Hazanavicius, an Oscar-winning director of The Artist, is operating on an altogether classier plain. Martin is fine if a bit wooden. The real star here is hunky French actor Louis Garrel who plays against type as the lisping, balding filmmaker.