Anne-Marie Miéville - Le livre de Marie AKA The Book of Mary (1984)

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Anne-Marie Miéville’s name is so closely linked to that of Jean-Luc Godard that many are unaware of her except as a character in the Godard myth or as an appendage to the Godard system. But Miéville has directed four features and three shorts that establish her as a major artist in her own right.

The importance of Miéville’s role in Godard’s work since the mid ’70s has often been obscured. Ici et ailleurs (1974) and Comment ça va (1976), which she co-directed, are typically discussed as artistic breakthroughs for Godard when they ought to be seen as dialogues between two collaborators. Miéville has also written, co-written, or edited several films directed by Godard, including Numéro deux (1975), Sauve qui peut (la vie) ("Every Man for Himself," 1979), Prénom Carmen ("First Name: Carmen," 1983), and Je vous salue, Marie ("Hail Mary," 1985).

It also obscures the fact that "Hail Mary" is actually two films in one, including the feature-length "Hail Mary," Godard's slangy, contemporary version of the annunciation and the birth of Jesus. The other is the 25-minute "The Book of Mary," Anne-Marie Mieville's uncontrovertibly fine little film about the break-up of a marriage as seen through the eyes of an exceptionally sweet, level-headed little girl. "The Book of Mary," has nothing immediately to do with the Godard film except that both contain characters named Mary.

A poet of childhood and the transitory, Miéville is also an accomplished painter of domestic spaces. In a scene in the beautiful short "Le livre de Marie" ("The Book of Mary," 1984), little Marie (Rebecca Hampton) does an improvised dance to a Mahler record in the apartment of her estranged parents. The warmth of the lighting stamps the apartment as a space where people live, grow, and change — where, as Marie’s mother (Aurore Clément) tells her in a characteristic moment of tenderness, "things become other than they were." The shots of Marie dancing rhyme with the opening of the film, a montage of shots of sky, water, trees, and fruit over which we hear a man and a woman discuss whether or not to break up. We join the couple in person only after these introductory images have established — through the calm insistence of their compositions and the ripeness of their colors — that this film of rupture and disorder will be fundamentally concerned with solidity, strength, and endurance.