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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The French New Wave filmmaker directed some of the most exciting, alive films ever made. Forty years later, they're still ahead of their time.
Aug 7, 1999 | Some years ago I was channel flipping and came across a shot of headlights moving along a street at night, accompanied by a Beethoven string quartet. Though I couldn't articulate why it filled me with such a melancholy feeling, something about that combination transfixed me. It was as if an essential image of modern rootlessness had been made to talk, to express a deep need for connection. After a few seconds I realized I was watching director Jean-Luc Godard's 1984 "First Name: Carmen," which I'd seen a few years earlier and hadn't liked. And as the movie went on, the spell cast by that Beethoven-scored shot evaporated very quickly.
There's always something a little dangerous about saying that an artist has never recaptured the excitement of his initial work. Too often that attitude is just a way for audiences to rationalize their own refusal to let an artist grow and change past the qualities that first attracted them. The growth Godard shows in the 15 movies he made between 1959's "Breathless" ("A bout de souffle") and 1967's apocalyptic and deeply frightening "Weekend" covers a distance in style and sensibility that most filmmakers don't approach in a lifetime.
And I have to be honest here and say that, while I long to believe the praise about the return of Godard that has greeted films like "Tout va bien" (1972), "Numero deux" (1975), "Every Man For Himself" (1979), "First Name: Carmen" and "Nouvelle vague" (1990), none of the films he's made since "Weekend" have captured me in the same way. Though fragments of them have: those headlight shots in "Carmen," the sight of an aged Eddie Constantine (reprising his "Alphaville" role of detective Lemmy Caution) wandering through a run-down Germany in "Germany Year 90 Nine Zero" (1991), the beautifully lit rooms of a mansion at twilight seen from the outside by a camera tracking along them in "Nouvelle vague" and the scenes of the French band Les Rita Mitsouko recording an album in "Keep Up Your Right" (1987).
The most heartbreaking thing about Godard's later work is the look of his movies. It's fair to say, especially in "Carmen" and "Detective" (1985), that Godard achieved one of the richest mature visual styles in films. Bathed in browns and golds that seem to be glowing from within, the movies depict human flesh with a richness that Ingres would admire. But Godard seems to have lost all interest in what's going on beneath the flesh, and even the assumption that something is. "Kids today are scum," he declares in "First Name: Carmen" in his role as "Uncle Jean," a broken-down old movie director. It's hard to laugh at this self-deprecating turn because it so obviously expresses the contempt and exhaustion evident in the rest of the movie. It's as if he finally reached the state described by the title of his first film "A bout de souffle": at the end of breath.
Exhaustion is not something you'd expect from watching Godard's '60s films -- immolation maybe. The 15 films from "Breathless" to "Weekend" fly through possibilities of style perhaps even faster than they fly through ideas. If there is one misconception about Godard that deserves changing it's that he is a cold, cerebral filmmaker. Yes, his films are filled with quotations (often spoken directly to the audience) from books and films, slogans, interpolated titles, philosophical concepts, musings on the very nature of movies and, especially as they go on, political agitprop. But no one who worked as fast as Godard (15 features and several shorts in eight years) could be expected to develop ideas fully. Instead what we often get are fragments, as beautifully structured as an epigram or as sloppily inserted as a note scribbled on a scrap of paper, and often abandoned as suddenly as they are introduced. This isn't to say that Godard's ideas aren't worth considering. No filmmaker has ever been more profoundly obsessed with the question of how movies, even ones made at the speed Godard worked, could keep pace with a culture that was both fragmenting and accelerating.
Responsive to pop, Godard refused to be limited by it. His first film, "Breathless," dedicated to the B-movie studio Monogram Pictures, was a poeticization of the grubby little gangster movies championed by Godard and his fellow critics at Cahiers du Cinema, Frangois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette among them, who went on to become the leading filmmakers of the French New Wave. "All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun," he once said, and breaking the appeal of noir down to those elements freed him from the genre's limitations. In this sort of love story between a small-time French hood (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and an American girl (Jean Seberg) abroad, Godard got at the intersecting and clashing sensibilities of the two cultures that had formed him. "Do you know William Faulkner?" Seberg asks at one point, and Belmondo replies bluntly, "No. Who's that? Some guy you slept with?" But it was the film's style, particularly Godard's invention of the jump-cuts (cutting within the same camera setup as opposed to from scene to scene or from actor to actor), that startled audiences and (even today) led some to accuse him of being a slipshod craftsman.
"Breathless" is still startling to audiences used to conventional storytelling; for others, it's the only Godard film they like. Only one of the films that followed had the same poetic approach to the crime genre (1964's almost unbearably tender "Band of Outsiders"); most became more fragmented. Godard liked to say that he was writing essays rather than telling stories, and that's certainly true of films like "Masculine-Feminine" (1965), whose subject has been famously described by its line "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola," and "Two or Three Things I Know About Her" (1966), an elegiac meditation on the dissatisfactions of consumer society and the ways in which film has and hasn't been co-opted by that society.
