See You Friday, Robinson (Mitra Farahani, 2022) (Patreon)

One of the most disarming aspects of See You Friday, Robinson is the portrait it provides of one of its subjects, Jean-Luc Godard. An elderly man, frail but still quite active, Godard is seen editing videos, but also folding his laundry and making some food in the kitchen. There is no sign of his partner, Anne-Marie Miéville, and at one point the director, Mitra Farahani, mentions that although they are still together, Godard lives alone. 

The surprising thing isn't seeing Godard performing mundane tasks. Rather, throughout Robinson, Godard seems eerily at peace. There is no sign of the cranky, embittered modernist, and very little of the gnomic oracle given to obscure intellectual riddles. Much of the time, Godard is smiling, even when (in one photo) he's lying in a hospital bed. 

It is difficult to view this film without sensing that Godard is at peace, and that on some level he has embraced death. He would end his life through assisted suicide shortly after Robinson was completed. And in one of his messages to his correspondent, Godard poses the problem of "self-death," a poetic proposition that understandably confounds the letter's recipient.

That would be Ebrahim Goldestan, the Iranian filmmaker and writer whose 99th birthday is celebrated in the film. The premise of Robinson is that, many years ago, Golestan and Godard were intended to meet, but circumstances interceded. A director during the Shah's reign, Golestan's career was cut short, and he has lived in the U.K. since 1975. Farahani, with the help of ARTE, was able to negotiate a virual conversation between the two artists. (When one considers Godard's infamous failure to appear in Agnès Varda's Faces Places, even after agreeing to do so, the very fact of his full participation in Robinson indicates a very different personal disposition.)

Godard's valedictory presence in this film ought to serve as a lure for cinephiles, but Robinson's real contribution will most likely be reminding the world of Golestan's films, as well as his feisty refusal to die. Like Godard, he is a man of infirmity, but in the film he projects effortless wit, a fierce humanist mind, and the overall sense of someone who still has work to do. For him, it seems part of that work has to do with reckoning with Godard and his legacy. Here is a director of his same generation, whose personal and political trajectory was very different than his. How, if at all, do they intersect?

Again, Robinson never plays like a footnote to the Godardian corpus, and not just because of Farahani's much closer focus on Golestan (who appears to be a mentor of hers). Anyone who has harbored skepticism about JLG's third, "philosophical" phase will find themselves nodding in agreement with Golestan's frustration, as Godard sends the Iranian director Histoire(s)-like collections of images, half-sentences, and open-ended questions. Golestan wonders aloud whether Godard even understands what correspondence is, and is often nonplussed by the expectation that he is to decode these weekly dispatches from Switzerland. 

See You Friday, Robinson is a bit like an exhibition tennis match. No championship is at stake, but there is much for a viewer to admire: the grace of effort, the subtleties of form, and a beatific sense that the outcome was always beside the point.