Tenis con JLG (2002): Playing Tennis with Jean-Luc Godard

There’s an abundance of Jean-Luc Godard documentaries online that treat Godard as saint or sinner in a classical way. There are fewer that treat him like he’d treat them. In 2002, two Spanish filmmakers, Guillermo Garcia-Ramos and David S. Truncheon, sent Godard a fax from Madrid challenging him to a tennis match at his club in Rolle, Switzerland, knowing of the French filmmaker’s passion for the sport. 

They set off, they train, they interview a huge variety of figures from the Godard world: Anna Karina, Andre Labarthe, Jean-Claude Carrière, Isabelle Huppert, Raoul Coutard and Patricia Finaly. Trying to learn about Godard so they can beat him at tennis.

Then, after fifty minutes of anecdotes, they arrive at the Rolle tennis club to find the door closed, and Godard’s home empty. The match never happened.

Godard either snubbed them (Like he did Agnes Varda in Faces Places) or simply never received the fax. It’s weird; it’s interesting, it can’t seem to decide if it’s an absurdist comedy or autofiction. But it’s worth 50 minutes. It’s on Vimeo. It’s less about Godard than about the experience of what Godard is.