See You Friday, Robinson. 2022. France/Switzerland/Iran/Lebanon. Directed by Mitra Farahani. With Jean-Luc Godard, Ebrahim Golestan, Ashi Esfandiary. New York premiere. In French, Persian, and English; English subtitles. 97 min.
Not too long before his death on September 13, 2022, Jean-Luc Godard opened the door to an epistolary and filmic relationship with the great if less known Iranian filmmaker and novelist Ebrahim Golestan (Brick and Mirror), now 100 and living in a castle in England. In taking up his producer Mitra Farahani’s playful challenge–to see where this much-belated correspondence would lead them–Godard, ever the devilish imp, began sending Golestan a series of cryptic and gnomic fragments of text and image, always signing off “See You Friday, Robinson!” in punning reference to Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe. These messages in a bottle, cast out from the isolation of his home in Rolle, Switzerland, comprise some of Godard’s concluding and yet (as ever) inconclusive statements on language, cinema, politics, death, regret, and love. Golestan replies in turn with his own profoundly moving and subversively funny thoughts on such big existential questions as well as on the mundanities and frustrations of old age.
See You Friday, Robinson forms a loose trilogy with Mitra Farahani’s previous portraits of artists in late career, Behjat Sadr: Time Suspended (2006) and Bahman Mohassess in Fifi Howls from Happiness (2013). Farahani is also the co-producer of Godard’s The Image Book (2022), and his forthcoming film Scénario, and she has been instrumental in the restoration of films by Ebrahim Golestan and Forough Farrokhzad, including their masterful collaboration The House Is Black (1962). New York premiere.