Entries associated with the tag "Jean-Luc Godard":

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. —L.P. Hartley

I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple. —Jean-Luc Godard

Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (now at Landmark's Century Centre) wants to tell the story of the last romantic couple too. Or is it the first romantic couple? Since in terms of literal historical period we're obviously nearer the beginning than the end—the age of capital R "Romanticism" and everything that implies, about prevailing cultural attitudes and standards of human behavior in the post-Napoleonic brave new world of 1830s France. But then why do these dandified lovers, impeccably decked out a la July Monarchy—in plush, exotic fabrics, colorful toques and mantillas, with oriental hookahs on the plein-air carpets, etc—seem so anachronistically like ourselves? Since however meticulous the period reconstructions—gilded rooms, railings and balustrades, statuary—the behavioral signals seem almost intimately familiar: could be us up there, since that's how we'd be responding right now. Which makes you wonder how foreign this country of the past can be ...

Same period,* different film. Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, which played in town a couple weeks back, seems as chilly and distant in its neoclassical reserve—Ingres contra Delacroix, the polarities of the era—as Mistress is romantically hung out. As in his earlier Joan the Maid (1993), where late medievals discuss theological dogmas like transubstantiation as if their lives depended on it (which in fact they did), Rivette's characters in Duchess seem driven by assumptions about life, behavior, ideology, etc, that we're not in a position to share. These people aren't us—if you want to "relate," be prepared to fight your way into the mind-set.

So what's to choose between them? Obviously a matter of inclination and taste, since both deliver their own brand of delectables. Whatever her merits as historian, Breillat's micromanaged attraction to the vagaries of human passion invites a complicity that Rivette, more austere and abstract, isn't inclined to give. On the other hand, Duchess fascinates out of sheer obliquity, its terse, alienating distance—everything less predictable since less familiar, a matter of epistemological cunning rather than identification strategies unleashed. Yet despite its raw immediacy, it's the Breillat that arguably wears you down and out. Too much us, not enough them. Where's negative capability when you really need it?

(*Actually it isn't, though every review I've read apparently thinks that Duchess is set in restoration France, in the early 1820s or thereabouts. But as the film's introductory title makes clear—not to mention Balzac's own source novel—the relevant "restoration" is of the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, not France's Louis XVIII. So Napoleon's empire would still be alive and kicking, if only for a short while more. No wonder everything's so neoclassical—it's exactly as it should be!)

You knew this was coming, right? Like, if you've ever heard me unload on him (except why would you?) over the past 30-odd years, you'd realize there's no love lost between us. I'm referring, of course, to Jean-Luc Godard, great cinematic pooh-bah and critical monstre sacre, whose every work I pretty well loathe, the whole damn filmography, and maybe, for all I know, even the putative "genius" behind the lens. Not that he hasn't earned it royally, that personalized dissing, or at least the endemic irritation--self-infatuated, arrogant, an absurdly pontifical piehole who's forever getting acolytes' credit for being what they'd call "inventive," "creative," "deconstructive," "an endless source of cinematic ingenuity," and so on and so forth, even as he's ritually haranguing you half to death, spewing contemptuous bile for at least the 50,000th time, in what's probably the cinematic equivalent of waterboarding at Guantanamo. Though actually it's not you he's hectoring and harassing but (thank god for it) them, millions upon millions of not yous, aka the great cinematic unwashed, a crass Weekend menagerie of contemptibles and out-of-its who simply can't (or, more likely, won't) admit to the master's genius, who'd probably rather watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation than endure yet another of his knee-jerking public rants. But who cares, since the objects of his scorn aren't actually the people he's condescending to address: just another case of "Good for thee but not for me," an utter lack of complicity with the target oafs and churls. Talk about needles stuck in grooves ... so what's Johnny Guitar been up to lately?

Though in fact the overall landscape's not quite as dismal as this--at least a few coruscating gems in the mix that even radical nonbelievers can admire, like In Praise of Love (though authorized fawners prefer to backpedal from this one--too accessible, I guess, the better to praise some logorrheic excrescence like Helas Pour Moi, which'd get you an automatic F from your analytic philosophy prof if you dropped it on his desk in college: so what say we sic Wittgenstein on this guy?)--a perfect proscenium artifact, cold, elegant, opaque: there's you and then there's it, floating ineffably in the cinematic empyrean ... Or La Chinoise, which in late-60s agitprop terms simply can't be bettered, the whole placard aesthetic brought to unlikely fruition, cardboard philosophizing that, in spite of it all, stays exquisitely en pointe. Though from the early 80s on we've been witness to the very public embarrassment (except when is Godard ever embarrassed?: obviously he's beyond it) of Jean-Luc's "rediscovering" Western civ, the whole cultural apparatus he'd furiously disowned through 20 years preceding: mirabile dictu, there's sin! there's Pascal! tres esquisse!--gee thanks, pal, but most of us have been there for a while, maybe a lifetime even. And actually it's just historical Geneva that's being channeled through him, the whole Swiss Calvinist ancestral heritage package--except when anyone else does it, replicates his/her formative antecedents and cultural experiences in utterly undigested ways, well, guess who's first in line to dump? But I suppose we're meant not to notice.

Probably my favorite Godard moment, which, not coincidentally, is also among the most revealing, comes in First Name: Carmen, wherein we're granted the privilege of admiring our hero as antinomian sage: unshaven, impossibly disheveled, matted hair framing dead guru eyes, just about the perfect existential wreck. Only it's actually "genius" in humble-pie disguise--"The only thing I know is that I know nothing," that cut of New Age salami--and just another proof of his intellectual finesse, successfully one-upping all the acolytes again: "Ah Jean-Luc, who knows enough to know that actually he doesn't!--what raw profundity, what rarefied perception!" What shameless ego-tripping's more my jaundiced take on it, never more fraudulent than when pleading the honest seeker ... Like, transparency my ass.

On the other hand, let's give credit where it's due: for a close, probing analysis of what I can only describe as my "Godard problem," perhaps nothing remotely compares with Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1988 Reader review (registration may be required) of the mountebank's King Lear, his "unforgettable" (put whatever construction on it you choose) free-form riffing on the Bard. As it happens I agree with Jonathan almost 100 percent on just about every critical point he raises: obviously we've seen the same movie (which is good for starters; doesn't always work out that way), and I recognize myself as the perennially resisting, problematic viewer he so thoroughly dissects. Yet when it comes to the foursquare meat-and-potatoes issue of, to put it baldly, "Is the film any 'good'?," then abruptly we part company: three smooching stars from Jonathan, whereas I'd have given it ZERO. And probably still would ... assuming I'd ever see it again ... which a pack of wild horses probably couldn't get me to do.

Which strikes me as pretty amazing, actually, that you can go so far with someone and still not share the critical terrain in any meaningful way. Or maybe it's just plain scary ...