Passion

Passion was the second film financed from Godard’s aborted Bugsy Siegel project with Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope Studios; the French director even borrowed sets from One from the Heart for a few (ultimately unused) scenes. In this maze of a film-within-a-film, two directors create a movie based on tableaux vivants of famous paintings, but because “you have to live stories before inventing them,” the action quickly moves to the world beyond the frames, where very real dramas of labor and love exist. Isabelle Huppert and Michel Piccoli costar with Hanna Schygulla, the Fassbinder muse whom Godard met when they were both coincidentally visiting Zoetrope.