Interview with Myriem Roussel

      It's not just Islamicists going ballistic over a secular portaiture of their divinity. Let's recall the 1985 picketing about the globe of Jean-Luc Godard's   Je Vous Salue Marie/Hail Mary, a modern retelling of the birth of Christ, which was condemned by Pope John Paul II, and then by our own Cardinal Bernard F. Law because "it does violence to a cherished belief." Sack Theatres of Boston, forerunner to the Loews Chain, capitulated to organized protests from the Archdiocese of Boston, and canceled a planned run at a downtown theatre. "Banned in Boston," Hail Mary opened instead at the Orson Welles Theatre in Cambridge, to respectable reviews from the critics (***1/2 -The Boston Herald) and salutations from the American Civil Liberties Union.

      Godard was bemused at the to-do in American and Europe about his film. At a 1985 Berlin Film Festival press conference, he labeled earlier protests at Versailles and Strasbourg "a benediction," praising the picketers because "They did their work as Christians, and they didn't do it badly." He did defend Hail Mary against attacks that it was blasphemous, saying, "It's a real story, Mary's story about life coming down from the sky. We've had lots of films about Jesus and the Bible, but none about Mary. Why? The Church should have made this film."

      Godard's Mary is a French basketball-playing daughter of a gas station attendant who finds herself mysteriously pregnant. She was played by Myriem Roussel, 23, a tall, thin, strikingly beautiful brunette who met Godard when she was 19, and then appeared in his Passion and First Name: Carmen." At Berlin, she sat silently at the press conference and chain-smoked while Godard pontificated. But later that day, the shy actress met with me for her first, and only, English-language interview.

      Roussel said that she and Godard had planned Hail Mary for three years.

      "We worked with video. Godard forced me to write down a diary of my thoughts, not regular writing but from my depths. I had no religious education, so I had to study the Bible. I watched Pasolini's film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and also Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. Godard loves that film, and I understand why he loves it. And I had to learn basketball. Godard wanted to do a basketball scene very much." Roussel noted that basketball, has   symbolic, spiritual associations: "the moon, the stomach when you are pregnant."

      Roussel had her first unsavory taste of Hail Mary picketers in front of a theatre in Strasbourg. She recalled, "There were five men, including a priest, and they hadn't seen the movie. I said to one man, 'I'll give you $3 to go inside,' but it was impossible to have a dialogue with them."

      She adamantly defended her controversial nudity in the film. "Mary is a virgin, but Mary is a woman too. For me, the decision was to show her in 1985 as an actual contemporary person. Maybe if we'd set the film in Biblical times, it could be shocking, but not now." Roussel also explained why she seems so mean and insensitive to the modern-day Joseph,   her Hail-Mary boyfriend, refusing to have any amorous contact with him. "It's not that Mary hates men,or that she's scared of sex.   It's only because she has been chosen for that special birth. She's predestined to act that way."

      Roussel thought a moment about that answer, and then added, "Anyway, I was like that too. When I was young, I had a boyfriend for two years. I gave him permission to hold my hand, but that was all."

GERALD PEARY
(Boston Phoenix, February, 2006)

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