It’s May 1968 and Jean-Luc Godard is marching along a Paris boulevard during an anti-establishment demo. On the face of it, things couldn’t be better for the leading light of the nouvelle vague: the great director is spending his spring lobbing stones at the riot police, haranguing students at sit-ins, and making love to his beautiful wife Anne Wiazemsky, nearly 20 years his junior and the star of his new film.

But, just then, a demonstrator sidles up and praises Godard’s early films – A Bout de Souffle with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Le Mepris with Brigitte Bardot. As the fan heaps on more praise, Godard’s face gets longer and longer. Doesn’t this guy realise that the old Godard is dead? That he has disowned those films? That, henceforth, he will only make austerely political cinema, such as his new picture La Chinoise, about a French Maoist cadre’s ill-fated plot to murder the Soviet ambassador? That Godard is now forming a film-making collective called the Dziga Vertov Group, eschewing bourgeois norms of artistic genius in favour of collective socialist endeavour?

This scene from Redoubtable, Michel Hazanavicius’s unexpectedly hilarious and often touching drama, recalls that moment in Stardust Memories when Woody Allen’s protagonist meets some aliens. “We enjoy your films!” the aliens tell Allen. “Particularly the early, funny ones.” Godard is in the same fix: critics and fans hate his new politicised stuff and want him to continue making films like the old ones they loved. Even the Chinese authorities, whom he thought might enjoy his championing of Maoist politics, send the director a critique of La Chinoise, damning it for political revisionism.

As the demonstrator continues, the camera closes in on the eyes behind Godard’s tinted lenses – the eyes of a man trapped in a personal tragedy and yet painfully aware of how funny his predicament looks from the outside. Godard has become a sad clown in a film he doesn’t even get to direct. Much of Redoubtable has this tragicomic air; there’s a running gag about his specs getting repeatedly crushed in Paris demos.

‘There was clearly something very seductive about him’ … Godard with Anne Wiazemsky in 1967. Photograph: Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images

Godard’s plight also resonates with Hazanavicius. The 50-year-old French director has made a film that breaks with expectations and risks making cinephiles, especially French ones, furious. In 2012, Hazanavicius won best picture and best director Oscars for The Artist, a black and white homage to Hollywood’s silent era. Now he’s made what seems to be its polar opposite: a portrait of a Hollywood-hating film-maker struggling through existential, political and marital crises.

Hazanavicius has sympathy for the diabolical genius of the nouvelle vague. “His fans want him to keep making the same movies,” he says. “They want Breathless 2. They can’t bear that he wants to change. I’ve been through that. I get that. All artists get that.”

In Redoubtable, Hazanavicius depicts Godard getting harangued by his friend, the great Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. He tells Godard that disdaining his old work is folly, astutely adding that the Franco-Swiss director knows nothing about the proletarians whose cause he purportedly shares. “Some people probably think me telling Godard’s story is blasphemy. My friends were worried. But he’s not my hero or my God. Godard is like the leader of a sect and I’m an agnostic.” At this point, I should probably point out that we are chatting in the bar of the Cinéma des Cinéastes in Paris.

In an earlier age, Hazanavicius might have been burned at the stake. In 2017, the most he risks is getting booed at Cannes, where Redoubtable is in competition for the Palme d’Or. “That won’t be a new experience for me,” he says . In 2014, The Search – his follow-up to The Artist, a drama about the Chechen war – was poorly received at the festival (the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “desperately well-meaning” in his two-star review). “I’m prepared for the worst, but hope for the best.”

Hazanavicius wanted to make Redoubtable after reading the memoirs of Wiazemsky, the German-born Frenchwoman who serially captivated directors. In 1966, aged 18, she starred in Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, fending off the director’s on-set advances. While filming, she met Godard and they married a year later.

He whispered her lines through an earpiece … Anne Wiazemsky with Jean-Pierre Leaud in Godard’s La Chinoise. Photograph: Simar/Anouchka/Rex/Shutterstock

Godard’s biographer Colin MacCabe once suggested that film-making is a ploy used by unprepossessing and sex-obsessed men to get beautiful women to act out their fantasies. If so, Godard was a virtuoso. He was married first to Anna Karina then toWiazemsky, and directed both. In La Chinoise, Godard whispered Wiazemsky’s Marxist-inflected lines to her through an earpiece.

Wiazemsky was scarcely out of her teens when they married. In a monologue Hazanavicius adapted from her memoir, she explains why she became besotted with the middle-aged director: he was free, witty, charming, an artist who didn’t give a damn for bourgeois mores or artistic tradition.

“That’s why I wanted Louis Garrel to play Godard,” says Hazanavicius. “Everybody has heard that he was a mean guy. For me, that couldn’t have been the whole story. There was clearly something very seductive about him. So I cast Louis – he’s so handsome, so seductive.” Garrel had already played a sexually and politically active lead in Paris circa 1968, having starred as Eva Green’s twin in Bertolucci’s ménage à trois The Dreamers.

When Hazanavicius asked to buy the rights to Wiazemsky’s memoir, she initially resisted. “I was about to hang up,” he recalls. “I said, ‘That’s too bad because I think it would be funny.’ And in that moment, she decided that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. She said, ‘I think it was a funny relationship and a funny time.’” So Hazanavicius wrote a film that dares to be funny about her ostensibly earnest husband. “He wants to be serious,” he says, “but you can see sometimes he has a sense of his own comic absurdity. And his films are very funny, even when he’s lecturing you politically.”

One striking parallel between Hazanavicius and Godard is that the former often directs his own wife, Bérénice Bejo (in Redoubtable, she plays one of Godard’s long-suffering friends). “I don’t think there is much similarity,” he says, “between our marriage and the one I show on screen.” Do you share his politics? “No. I am of the left, but not the extreme left like him. Maybe if I’d been his age in 1968, I’d have been a revolutionary, too. But I wasn’t.”

Ready to lob a few stones … Louis Garrel as Godard on a demonstration. Photograph: StudioCanal

And there’s another fault line: Hazanavicius is Jewish and Godard is shown to be antisemitic in the film, telling a booing Sorbonne sit-in that “the Jews have become the new Nazis” and that the question now is to think who are the new Jews. “I think what he said was ridiculous – nobody needed to think, then, about who the new Jews were. And the idea that Jews are Nazis is absurd.”

So what’s the point of that scene? “To show someone who wants to be provocative.” While researching the film, he met Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the veteran soixante-huitard student leader and a Jew, who remains a friend of Godard’s despite everything. “He says Godard’s a masochist and I agree. He always puts himself in painful situations.”

In Redoubtable, those painful situations become the stuff of tragicomedy. “He’s killing everything around him – his films, his friends, his wife. And then it’s logical he kills himself. That, I think, is what he did: when he creates the Dziga Vertov Group, where he no longer directs his own movies, he’s essentially killing himself.” Yet Hazanavicius is compassionate enough to show that Godard is aware of his absurdity, of his ability to alienate people, of the unbearableness of being Jean-Luc Godard.

In one powerful scene that seems to come straight from Godard’s own 1960s playbook, the sound of Richard Strauss’s Im Abendrot swoons heartbreakingly in the background as the couple row in some dismal hotel room. Godard harangues while Wiazemsky tearfully realises, as do we, that the man she loved has become a controlling, sociopathic, joyless jerk and that their marriage is over. What did Wiazemsky think when she saw that scene? “It was difficult for her to speak. She recognised something.”



What about Godard? Did you seek his consent? “No, but I sent him a letter. I said I’m doing a movie based on Anne Wiazemsky’s book and the main character is Jean-Luc Godard.”

Although Godard, now 86, asked to see the script, he has not passed judgment – yet. One possibility is that Godard may step in and try to shut down the Cannes film festival. Does that sound far-fetched? Well, 49 years ago he, along with other French directors, did just that, successfully arguing that in solidarity with the workers and the students who were protesting across France, the festival should be cancelled.

We’re speaking just days before the second round of the French presidential election. Hazanavicius feels obliged to vote for Emmanuel Macron, the centrist ex-banker, if only to keep Marine Le Pen from power. But he stills feels disenfranchised: there is no leftwing candidate.

“You know what?” says Hazanavicius, as he remembers Godard’s protest. “Maybe the same thing should happen now. France was in crisis then and today. Who wants to watch films in Cannes with what’s going on in the country?”