See You Friday, Robinson organises an encounter between two of cinema’s leading figures, which the distance from England to Switzerland does not allow, but editing makes possible. Mitra Farahani instigated an epistolary exchange, and here they are, honouring their engagement every Friday. “Why not? Let’s start with a correspondence. We may not correspond to one another,” answers the film industry’s most famous mumbling from Jean-Luc Godard, who, with Ebrahim Golestan, makes up this unexpected pairing. Both of them accept the challenge as filmmakers. And Farahani enjoys the scholarship of these two learned men who at first misunderstand each other. One, serious, gravely elaborates meanings while the other, playful, diverts with impertinence, more interested in the endless play of analogies. Not without a certain mischief, the director explores the contrasts. As Godard struggles with his socks, Golestan is irritated by the sound of dishes behind him. The tall windows and stately Hollywood staircase of the English manor house contrast with the cramped Swiss interior and its owner’s disinclination for decoration. The film shifts back and forth between depth and frivolity, the brazen and the sacred. It gleefully travels between visual and audio materials. Accommodating Godard’s principles, it’s cloaked in a grandiloquent Beethoven that dramatises without warning just as it’s also brutally silenced. Fridays come and go, and Godard’s playfulness peters out as Golestan becomes less serious. Euclid’s definition of parallel lines that never meet just depends on the shot. A change of dimension and axiom is no longer necessary. The two artists, then, meet up in a hospital room, their burgeoning friendship influenced by the weight and age of their bodies. Their visions, which infect each other, end up merging in the pleasure of the game, looking at the world together with the joy and freedom of the child who “never asks why”.
(Claire Lasolle)Mitra Farahani