Week of November 7, 2007, Issue #629
FILM
Jean-Luc Godard says Fou to your bourgeois cinema
JOSEF BRAUN / josef@vueweekly.com
Jean-Luc Godard was pumping out movies at such a frenzied rate during the 1960s that it’s a project in itself to try and figure which ones should stand out and why. Many of them are as fresh and culturally insightful as ever, and many others whose references have grown obscure have for this very fact become primers on that decade’s intellectual zeitgeist. I sometimes wonder if Godard himself is as surprised as anyone else that his films have aged so well after the children of Marx and Coca-Cola have long ago eased into the coziness of middle age.While lots of fun, Breathless (1960) is surely only as iconic as it is for being among the opening pistol shots of the French New Wave, and of those three or four titles the most emblematic of the movement’s significance as an engine of film industry revolution and subversive nostalgia. Of those I’ve been able to see, I’m still pretty partial to Contempt (1963) myself, his first film in colour and one that gets to have its cake and eat it too, presenting Brigitte Bardot’s magnificent ass to the world in an array of pleasing colours while still holding down Godard’s cred as a deft evader of mainstream respectability.
I don’t know that he was ever more endearingly playful with youthful foreplay and idea-love than in Masculin féminin (1966), or that his collected devices of alienation, pastiche, pop exploitation and juxtaposition were ever more effective or entertaining than in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), which is perhaps my absolute favourite. And then there’s Weekend (1967), which might be the sharpest apocalyptic movie ever, seeing as how it brings the whole deal down to our relationship to cars a full four decades before Al Gore. Needless to say, all of these have been aided at the box office or video store by being consistently populated by hot French babes.
But there are many who make a strong case for Pierrot le Fou (1965), which Metro Cinema will be showing this weekend to what I hope will be an eager, alert and sizable crowd. The film was certainly a milestone in that Godard brought out everything but the kitchen sink in his attempt to tell an archetypal lovers-on-the-run tale with as many destabilizing effects as possible. The thing is audaciously indecisive from top to bottom, refusing to develop character or story in any cohesive direction while piling on oodles of possible options. As they flee Paris for the Mediterranean, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne (Anna Karina), a bourgeois husband and his foxy, elusive babysitter, also flee any fixed notion of who they or any movie characters need to be. The ostensible narrative’s ostensible romantic despair aside, these two are above all concerned with play acting, donning the masks of numerous movie personas and, in one of the best and most outrageous scenes, even those of the combatants on either side of the Vietnam War. It’s dizzying and fun, smart and silly, gorgeous and crude. And it goes on for a pretty exhausting two hours.
It’s probably indicative that when most people who’ve seen Pierrot le Fou try to recall it they usually do so only in fragments: Sam Fuller’s cameo, Belmondo suddenly becoming literally blue in the face or the moment when the film transforms into a humid musical. I’m personally fond of the shots of Ferdinand and Marianne in a car, the illusion of movement conveyed only through a coloured light passing over their faces, a terrifically primitive effect that somehow goes hand in hand with Godard’s hilariously arbitrary use of repeated music. But the question inevitably arises: what the hell does it all add up to? And is it a movie or a chapter in a career? The tension between something akin to a genuine dramatic narrative and formal detachment that fuelled Contempt is forsaken here—it’s all detachment, however fitfully entertaining that detachment might be.
In a deliberately Godardian essay as reverential as it is ruthlessly critical, David Thomson’s Godard entry in The Biographical Dictionary of Film declares that Godard’s films deal with “moments of cinema and with his jungle of reference, but never with feelings ... He is the first director, the first great director, who does not seem to be a human being.” Curiously, Thomson asserts that Pierrot is an exception to Godard’s overwhelming emotional indifference in that whenever his camera is pointed at Karina, his first wife, we get a rare sense of his real desire. Yet Thomson also states that “the discovery that he loved Karina more in moving images than in life” may have broken their marriage.
Maybe what finally emerges from all this is that Godard’s films, and Pierrot especially, are a testament to the cinema as a totalitarian utopia, pushing out everything else until all that’s left is cinema. Not the most life-affirming message, but one that’s fun to be persuaded by when passing a couple of hours in the dark. V
Fri, Nov 9, Sun, Nov 11, Tue, Nov 13 (9 pm)
Sat, Nov 10, Mon, Nov 12, Wed Nov 14 (7 pm)
Pierrot le Fou
Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani, Samuel Fuller