Recensioni de* critic*

Frame by luminous frame, Hail Mary (1985) seems to me [Godard's] most beautiful work... Far from shocking, Hail Mary feels like a brave, all-too-rare attempt to regain innocence when looking at the body, nature and everything else, as if virginity – ‘knowing only the shadow of love' – was really a transcendent way of seeing the world.

Despite the tempestuousness of Mary and Joseph's body-soul struggle, Godard's filmmaking is calm and eloquent, nearly untroubled in an era of troublesome productions. Whether we see Mary's soul or not is undoubtedly up to the viewer, but the tender sympathy of this resolutely materialist filmmaker remains resplendent in its beauty and voluptuous in its polyphony of cinematic records—in ways that all but immediately reveal the pulsing meaning and power within the images' forms.

The film certainly doesn’t sully the image of Mary in any way, but instead turns her into the most finely nuanced and realistic female character Godard has ever created... It’s the way Mary wrestles with her responsibility that makes the film so fascinating.

...The idea sounds like a joke, and there is puckish humor in the movie (there's also a startling, yet sacral, eroticism, which resulted in protests against the film worldwide, including at its 1985 screening at the New York Film Festival), but Godard invests the subject with his full and passionate philosophical devotion, starting with the image itself.

Say what you will about this movie – that it's abstruse, heavy-handed, self-important, slow-moving – but to claim it's a damaging theological polemic misses the point... Hail Mary might be too recondite in its intentions and realization to be offensive: Besides Godard himself, who can honestly say they understand what this film is really about?

A profoundly felt, gravelly beautiful work of faith, where the potentially parodist aspects of the premise (the Nativity story recast in modern-day Geneva) are consistently tempered by august contemplation.

Those expecting a Last Temptation-esque biblical epic will be disappointed, for Hail Mary is a Godard film far more than anything else. What that means is that the ostensible narrative... is repeatedly waylaid by digressions—into philosophy, nature photography, even low comedy... Godard has chosen to embrace the abstruse, finding ideas more trustworthy companions than people.

The story is hard to follow (despite its familiarity!). Scenes are shapeless and often lead nowhere. There is a curious detachment, a lack of emotion. The actors are too passive... I cannot recommend "Hail Mary" - except, ironically, as a film that could inspire an interesting discussion.

Although the film is not difficult to follow, it is played in such a monotone, with such reverence, that, for the first time in my career as a Godard-watcher, I was tempted to let my mind wander, if not cut off completely... ''Hail Mary'' may be a serious film, but it's not especially provocative or entertaining.