Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)

 

Cast: Anna Karina, László Szabó, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marianne Faithfull, Yves Afonso. Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, based on a novel by Donald Westlake. Cinematography: Raoul Coutard. Film editing: Françoise Collin, Agnès Guillemot. 

Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. wasn’t released in the titular country until 2009 because Godard failed to secure the rights to the Donald E. Westlake novel on which it was based, although it’s unlikely that even Westlake would recognize the film’s relationship to the novel he published under the pseudonym Richard Stark. It’s an allusive (and some would say elusive) ramble through all manner of detective fiction and film noir, often wearing its sources on its sleeve, with references to fictional characters, movie actors (e.g., Richard Widmark, whose name László Szabó bears in the film), filmmakers (e.g. Otto Preminger), and screenwriters (e.g. Ben Hecht). But it’s also, as the character played by Jean-Pierre Léaud and bearing the name of the director Don Siegel says, “a political movie. Just like a Disney movie, only with blood.” Anna Karina’s detective Paula Nelson is searching for the killer of one Richard Politzer, except that we never hear the last name in the film: It’s always blocked out by some off-screen sound like a car horn. The reason seems to be that Godard is alluding to the Marxist philosopher Georges Politzer, a figure of some controversy in the  hyperpolitical France of the 1960s. Most of the movie’s literary, cinematic, political, and historical allusions can be ignored, if you just want to let the bright colors of Raoul Coutard’s cinematography dazzle you and the foolery of the film’s parody and nonsense scenes wash over you. (If you want more, there’s a very good short film about the allusions included with the Criterion Collection edition of the movie, which is also currently available on the Criterion Channel.) 

Le Petit Soldat (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

Michel Subor and Anna Karina in Le Petit Soldat

Bruno Forestier: Michel Subor
Veronica Dreyer: Anna Karina
Jacques: Henri-Jacques Huet
Paul: Paul Beauvais
Laszlo: László Szabó
Activist Leader: Georges de Beauregard

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film editing: Agnès Guillemot, Lila Herman, Nadine Trintignant
Music: Maurice Leroux

Le Petit Soldat was Jean-Luc Godard's second feature film, made in 1960 but held up by French censorship because of its political content until 1963. Its characters are dour and talky, but there's a great deal of life stirring in the film as they try to navigate the existential dilemmas they find themselves in. The protagonist, Bruno Forestier, is a kind of freelance soldier of fortune, a Frenchman exiled in Switzerland, not coincidentally Godard's country of birth. He poses as a photographer, and utters Godard's famous statement, "Photography is truth. And cinema is truth 24 times a second." Bruno woos the pretty Veronica Dreyer, a Danish woman who shares the surname of the great film director Carl Theodor Dreyer, by taking pictures of her. Blackmailed by French intelligence into assassinating a pro-Arab leader, he gets caught and tortured in scenes that are quite graphic: He's handcuffed in a bathtub and his hands are singed by the flame of a lighter, he's waterboarded, and he's given electric shocks. (Michel Subor, the actor who plays Bruno, evidently underwent all of these tortures, though not for the extended periods Bruno experiences.) Eventually he gets free and goes through with the planned assassination, having struck a deal with the French that he and Veronica can escape to Brazil, but in the meantime the French have discovered that she's been working with the Arabs and she's tortured to death. All of this is staged in the deadpan manner characteristic of early Godard, and with a certain amount of ironic humor, especially in the scenes in which a frustrated Bruno pursues his target in a car down two-lane French roads, never quite able to get alongside the target to take the shot. Clearly, there's a lot to chew on in Le Petit Soldat, a Godardian mélange of politics and sex and alienation -- Bruno says, looking in a mirror, "When I look myself in the face, I get the feeling I don't match what I think is inside." Whether you think it's worth watching -- and I do -- probably depends on your taste for mid-20th-century Angst.

Lola (Jacques Demy, 1961)

Anouk Aimée in Lola

Lola / Cécile: Anouk Aimée
Roland Cassard: Marc Michel
Michel: Jacques Harden
Frankie: Alan Scott
Madame Desnoyers: Elina Labourdette
Jeanne, Michel's Mother: Margo Lion
Cécile Desnoyers: Annie Duperoux
Claire, the Bar Owner: Catherine Lutz
Daisy: Corinne Marchand
Yvon, Lola's Son: Gérard Delaroche

Director: Jacques Demy
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Production design: Bernard Evein
Film editing: Anne-Marie Cotret
Music: Michel Legrand

The characters in Lola, as in many of Jacques Demy's films, see life as performance art. They're ready to don the mask and play the role at any moment: Lola even wears her black lace cabaret-performer costume under a trenchcoat when she's out on the street. The film opens with a poseur, the then-mysterious "cowboy" dressed in white and driving a white Cadillac convertible, who is later revealed to be Lola's missing husband, Michel. Everyone, it seems, is putting on an act, especially Mme. Desnoyers, whose constant concern with appearances has begun to rub off on her daughter, Cécile. Sometimes Demy imposes a role on his characters: The young American sailor, Frankie, hangs out with a troupe of sailors that recalls MGM musicals of the 1940s like Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945) and On the Town (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1949) which starred a famous Frankie. Even the most spontaneous character in the film, Roland, wears his ennui like a costume. To my taste, this constant role-playing gets a little tiresome -- I keep wanting the characters to have an unguarded moment. Although Demy's films often seem to me to be better in retrospect than in the watching, as you work out the playful cross-references -- young Cécile's name is the same as Lola's real one, and so on -- and allusions to books and movies, there is much to be said for what's on screen, particularly Anouk Aimée's giddy, uninhibited Lola, a long way from her role in 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963) as Guido's soignée neglected wife. There's some roughness in this film, Demy's first, such as the odd fact that Alan Scott, an American actor, speaks with a non-American accent when his lines are in English -- I don't think anyone born in New Jersey would pronounce "Chicago, Illinois" the way Frankie does, so I suspect dubbing. But as self-conscious a film as it is, Lola is a rewarding one.

Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)

Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie

Nana Kleinfrankenheim: Anna Karina
Raoul: Sady Rebbot
Paul: André S. Labarthe
Yvette: Guylaine Schlumberger
Le chef: Gérard Hoffman
Elisabeth: Monique Messine
Journaliste: Paul Pavel
Dimitri: Dimitri Dineff
Jeune homme: Peter Kassovitz
Luigi: Eric Schlumberger
Le philosophe: Brice Parain

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film editing: Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Guillemot
Music: Michel Legrand

The essential tension of Vivre Sa Vie comes from Jean-Luc Godard's dry intellectual detachment and self-conscious filmmaking set against his exquisitely passionate involvement with Anna Karina. It shows itself at the very beginning, when Godard gives us almost a mug shot treatment of Karina's face -- frontal, right profile, left profile -- and then follows with an extended scene that features only the back of her head. And it continues through to the end in which Edgar Allan Poe's story about an artist who sucks the life out of his beloved by painting her portrait foreshadows the death of Karina's character, Nana. On one level, the film posits art as the enemy of life, while on the other, art becomes a source of life. In the latter case, I'm thinking of the celebrated scene in which Nana is brought to tears by watching Renée Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928). It can be argued that Nana identifies with Joan as a fellow martyr: Joan to her faith in God, Nana to her faith in herself -- viz., the speech in which she claims "responsibility" for everything she does. Vivre Sa Vie is full of such intellectual puzzles, including the extended conversation between Nana and the philosopher Brice Parain. But it's Karina's performance that lifts the film out of the thicket of mid-century existentialism that it threatens to become ensnared by. She makes Nana one of the essential characters not just of the French New Wave but of the entire history of movies.

The Soft Skin (François Truffaut, 1964)

Françoise Dorléac and Jean Desailly in The Soft Skin

Pierre Lachenay: Jean Desailly
Nicole: Françoise Dorléac
Franca Lachenay: Nelly Benedetti
Clément: Daniel Ceccaldi
Ingrid: Laurence Badie
Theater Manager: Philippe Dumat
Sabine Lachenay: Sabine Haudepin

Director: François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film editing: Claudine Bouché
Music: Georges Delerue

Some film titles almost seem to invite critical snark: I'm sure I'm not the first to be tempted to say that The Soft Skin is "only skin deep." But that sums up my reaction to François Truffaut's film: Its characters aren't developed enough. According to Truffaut, the inspiration for the film was seeing a couple kissing in a taxicab and wondering if they were cheating on their respective spouses, which led to meditations on the topic of adultery. Truffaut was working on his book about Alfred Hitchcock at the time, and perhaps Hitchcock's own explorations in voyeurism turned Truffaut into a voyeur as well. The protagonist, Pierre Lachenay, is a celebrated intellectual, a writer and editor whose lectures draw admiring crowds and even bring news photographers out to greet his arrival and ask him to pose with the pretty flight attendant he has encountered on the plane. The flight attendant is Nicole, although the appropriate word for her job would have to be "stewardess," for the film takes place in a time when flight attendants were exclusively young and female, almost airborne geishas, whose job was to please the mostly male business travelers. Their supposed sexual availability was of course an illusion, but one exploited in gag lines like "Coffee, tea, or me?" and in soft- and hard-core porn films. It's also a subtext to the character played by Françoise Dorléac, who captures Lachenay's roving eye on a flight to and from Lisbon, where he gives a talk on Balzac. The development of their affair begins to take on the character of farce, especially when they try to get away from Lachenay's wife for a few days under the cover of an introduction he is giving to a film about André Gide at a theater in Reims. Trying to hide their relationship is harder than they expect: Lachenay keeps encountering obstacles like unexpected dinner engagements and awkward hotel arrangements, and more especially an officious manager of the event who even winds up inviting himself on a ride to Paris with Lachenay, who has tried to cover up the fact that he's at another hotel with Nicole by saying that he has to return to the city that same evening. These scenes are mutedly funny: Their farcical character is tempered by Truffaut's skillful development of tension. Of course, the affair is doomed, but not before Mme. Lachenay learns of it, which leads to a ending marked by melodramatic violence. The whole film is an exhibition of Truffaut's skill; he plays with stretching and foreshortening time, with building suspense, with scenes that echo one another, and with subtle eroticism, all of it heightened by Raoul Coutard's exquisite black-and-white cinematography and Georges Delerue's score. But in Lachenay he hasn't given us a character who draws our sympathy, and his directing Jean Desailly to maintain an inexpressive face allows us to wonder what, exactly, this beautiful young woman sees in this ordinary-looking middle-aged man. It's an often provocative film, but one that depends more on film technique than on engaging characters and effective storytelling, so it left me cold.

Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc in Weekend

Corinne Durand: Mireille Darc
Roland Durand: Jean Yanne
Head of the Front de Libération de la Seine et Oise: Jean-Pierre Kalfon
Saint-Just: Jean-Pierre Léaud
Tom Thumb: Yves Afonso
Emily Brontë: Blandine Jeanson
Joseph Balsamo: Daniel Pommereulle
Pianist: Paul Gégauff
African: Omar Diop
Arab: László Szabó

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Based on a story by Julio Cortázar
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Antoine Duhamel

"You say you want a revolution / Well, you know, / We all want to change the world." I'm old enough to remember when John Lennon and Paul McCartney were denounced as capitalist reactionaries for that song, especially for lines like "But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow." So watching Jean-Luc Godard's satire Weekend takes me back to the days of a revolutionary fervor that now seems naive, especially since the violent year of 1968 culminated in the election of Richard Nixon, and Mao has been relegated to the ranks of history's more odious tyrants. Still, there's nothing naive about Weekend, which although it now looks less like a great film than a self-indulgent one at least demonstrates the indulgence of a great self, i.e., Jean-Luc Godard's. Is Godard celebrating the revolutionary spirit or sending it up? Weekend ranges from fascinating to stupefying, from bravura filmmaking like the pan along the traffic jam and the repeated 360-degree pan around a farmyard where a pianist is playing a Mozart sonata, to the eye-glazing extended readings from the works of Stokely Carmichael and Frantz Fanon and the drum solo accompanied by a Whitmanesque poem by Lautréamont. Pauline Kael got it right when she called Weekend a "vision of Hell," but what seems most significant now is that it's a hell that lies just beneath us, covered by the veneer of civilization. In Weekend, civilization is showing cracks being widened by unbridled consumerism. And who's to say in the age of climate change denial, abrogation of human rights, and raging corporate globalization that those cracks haven't widened still further? This is a film made by a man who definitely doesn't "know that it's gonna be all right."

Watched on the Filmstruck Criterion Channel

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

Marina Vlady in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

Juliette Jeanson: Marina Vlady
Marianne: Anny Duperey
Robert Jeanson: Roger Montseret
John Bogus, the American: Raoul Lévy
Roger: Jean Narboni

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Based on an article by Catherine Vimenet
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

At the beginning of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, we see a beautiful woman on the screen and the narrator (Jean-Luc Godard) whispers to us some things that he knows about her: that she is the actress Marina Vlady and that she is looking to the right. And yes, she is Marina Vlady, but in a moment the narrator is whispering again that she is Juliette Jeanson, which is the role Vlady is playing in the film. And yes, she is looking to the right, except that it's our right; she is looking to her left. So immediately Godard has launched us into some conundrums involving actor and role as well as subject and object. Godard will insistently whisper his comments on these and other epistemological questions throughout the film, as we watch Marina/Juliette move through a day in which Juliette takes her daughter to a very strange day care center, has her car washed, buys a dress, meets a friend, and turns a few tricks. We also watch the work at construction sites and contemplate the swirling foam on the surface of a cup of coffee. And throughout we are not only whispered to by Godard, but also hear Juliette's thoughts and the conversation of other characters on the nature and limitations of language and art and philosophy, as well as the psychic disturbance and political significance of the Vietnam War. For some, all this will constitute an hour and a half of pretentious and boring fiddle-faddle, the cinematic equivalent of the philosophical bull sessions we had in our college dorms. But let me hasten to defend the philosophical bull session: It stretched our minds at the right time in our lives, when we had the patience for ideas. Too few of us have the patience for ideas anymore, and that may be an incalculable loss. It's easy to mock films like 2 or 3 Things, to ignore their essential playfulness, their overturning of the complacent expectation that a movie should tell a story or excite or entertain us. But pause to gnaw on some of the some of the things that are said in the film, such as "To say that the limits of language, of my language, are those of the world, of my world, and that in speaking, I limit the world, I end it." Or contemplate the fact that the surface of a stirred cup of coffee looks like the spiraling of a galaxy. Or engage your eyes with cinematographer Raoul Coutard's widescreen compositions. Or question the film's obsession with commercialism, which echoes Andy Warhol's exaltation of soup cans and Brillo boxes into art. Or do anything else that the film prods you to do, including wonder why Juliette leads the life she does, and you've got at the heart of what makes Godard such a radically important filmmaker.

Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960)

You can tell this is an early French New Wave film because there's plenty of sending up the old way of doing things in movies -- in particular the American crime thriller -- without attempting anything terribly new. For example, at one point the protagonist is sitting up in bed with the woman he has just slept with and tells her to "do it the way they do in the movies," whereupon she covers her exposed breasts by tucking the sheet under her arms. The shifts in tone are astonishing, from slapstick to real violence and back again, which is what we expect of a New Wave classic. But there is nothing truly groundbreaking in Truffaut's storytelling here, the way there was in the feature that immediately preceded Shoot the Piano Player, The 400 Blows (1959), or would be in his next, Jules and Jim (1962). Still, we have a wonderfully engaging performance by Charles Aznavour as the titular pianist, Charlie Kohler aka Edouard Saroyan. We also have a perfectly fitted score by Georges Delerue and cinematography by Raoul Coutard that often betrays Truffaut's love of Alfred Hitchcock. Watching Shoot the Piano Player, it's easy to see why Truffaut was the first person approached to direct Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), with its similar oscillations in tone.

Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)

Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) is insane, and Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) love each other more than either of them loves Catherine. That's obviously a reductive way of looking at the movies' most famous ménage à trois, but it's my takeaway from the most recent viewing of Truffaut's masterpiece. Why is Catherine insane? one should ask. Because she's a free spirit trapped in a woman's body when freedom for women can be glimpsed but not fully achieved. Note how liberated she becomes when she dresses as a man, smoking a stogie (pace Dr. Freud, but sometimes a cigar is more than just a cigar) and providing a light for a strange man outside of a pissoir. And at no time do Jules and Jim find her more sexually desirable, I think. Naturally, she marries Jules, the more repressed of the two, and finds further liberation by cheating on him rather than falling into the socially respectable roles of wife and mother. As for the "bromance" of Jules and Jim, that too skirts societal disapproval: The narrator tells us that their friendship was much talked about. Even separated by a war that puts them on opposing sides, each worries that he may find himself killing the other. But they survive, only to find Catherine testing their friendship. That it survives the test until Catherine kills one of them is the film's deepest irony. And Catherine is never able to find the freedom she seeks, even after death: Her desire to have her ashes scattered to the winds is thwarted by "the regulations," as the narrator (Michel Subor) tells us. It is, of course, one of the great films, made so by Moreau's tremendous performance, by Georges Delerue's score, and by Raoul Coutard's cinematography, but most of all by Truffaut's direction and (with Jean Gruault) endlessly fascinating script. Even Jules and Catherine's daughter, Sabine, is perfectly presented: Sabine Haudepin is one of the least affected, least annoying child performers ever to appear on screen.

A Woman Is a Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1961)

Jean-Claude Brialy and Anna Karina in A Woman Is a Woman

Émile Récamier: Jean-Claude Brialy
Angela: Anna Karina
Alfred Lubitsch: Jean-Paul Belmondo

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Production design: Bernard Evein
Music: Michel Legrand

Orson Welles is often quoted as having said, when he saw the production facilities available to him at RKO, "This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had!" I imagine Jean-Luc Godard saying something like that when he was told that he could make his second feature film, after the success of Breathless (1960), in color and Franscope (an anamorphic wide-screen process like Cinemascope). But of course Godard and his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, had no intention of using the wide screen for its conventional purpose, the epic and spectacular. Instead, many of the tricks the director and the cinematographer pulled off in A Woman Is a Woman were playful ones, like filming the tiny, cramped apartment of Angela and Émile in a medium more suited to Versailles. The effect is not only slightly giddy, but it also serves to emphasize the difficulties the couple are having in their relationship. The movie is brightly inconsequential, the kind of colorful musicalized nonsense that Jacques Demy would master a few years later with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), using the same composer Godard does, Michel Legrand. The success of Breathless seems to have gone to Godard's head a bit: He enlists its star, Jean-Paul Belmondo, as the third leg of the movie's romantic triangle, and has him speak a line about not wanting to miss Breathless on TV. Belmondo also encounters Jeanne Moreau in a cameo bit, asking her how Jules and Jim is going -- Godard's fellow New Wave sensation, François Truffaut, was in the midst of filming it with Moreau. The best thing A Woman Is a Woman has going for it is Karina, who was about to become Godard's muse and for a while his wife.

Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

Eddie Constantine in Alphaville

Lemmy Caution: Eddie Constantine
Natacha von Braun: Anna Karina
Henri Dickson: Akim Tamiroff
Professor von Braun: Howard Vernon

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Production design: Pierre Guffroy
Music: Paul Misraki

I think Alphaville may have been responsible for my former distaste for Godard movies: When I saw it on its first American run -- probably at that temple of Harvard hip, the Brattle Theater -- I couldn't figure out why anyone would make a sci-fi movie starring an American-French B-movie actor as a trenchcoated secret agent in a future that looked a lot like contemporary Paris. Or why the beautiful Natacha Von Braun should fall in love with anyone who looks like Eddie Constantine -- the apparent survivor of a close encounter with a cheese grater. But time and experience teach you a lot about what's really witty, and Alphaville is that. Yes, it's a spoof on both sci-fi and spy movies, with Paul Misraki's score providing the familiar dun-dun-DUNN! underscoring of suspenseful moments as Lemmy Caution slugs and shoots his way out of ridiculously staged confrontations. But how many spoofs have we seen that fall flat because they're so self-conscious about their spoofery? Godard's spoof  succeeds because Constantine, Karina, and that great slab of Armenian ham Akim Tamiroff take their roles so seriously. Like most Godard movies, it's often absurdly talky, but the talk is provocative. And even though it seems to be designed to make a point about the way contemporary design and architecture have a way of alienating us from the human, it doesn't hammer the point. My one complaint in this recent viewing is that Turner Classic Movies showed a muddy print in which the subtitles had their feet cut off.