Showing posts with label 1960 Films. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1960 Films. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Short Take: L'avventura
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Short Take: Black Sunday
Monday, September 24, 2018
Short Take: Shoot the Piano Player
There's a jazzy, anything-goes spirit to François Truffaut's tragicomic crime drama Shoot the Piano Player. The main character is a one-time concert pianist (Charles Aznavour) who has bottomed out after a family tragedy. Apart from raising his youngest brother (Richard Kanayan), he's retreated from life. He's changed his name, and earns a modest living playing piano with a dance band at a local bar. But beyond that, all he wants is to be left in peace. His past, though, again confronts him. It's in good ways and bad. The good is the waitress (Marie DuBois) who knows who he is, and with whom he falls in love. The bad are the two adult brothers (Jean-Jacques Aslanian and Albert Remy) who get him mixed up in their wranglings with local gangsters. Truffaut does full dramatic justice to the plotting and the protagonist's inner conflicts. But he also treats the story as a springboard for constant arabesques: observational humor, oddball conversations, music and dance numbers, slapstick and romantic comedy scenes, and a bevy of cinematic flourishes. The delight of the film is that the spontaneous atmosphere doesn't distract. It enriches the material. The discords keep one attentive to the rather banal pulp material, and give it a wonderful true-to-life rhythm. The effect is further enhanced by Raoul Coutard's superb documentary-style cinematography. The stars enhance the film, too. Charles Aznavour's hangdog manner and Marie DuBois' down-to-earth dream-girl quality are perfect. The cast also includes Nicole Berger, Michèle Mercier, and Daniel Boulanger. The screenplay, credited to Truffaut and Marcel Moussy, is based on the David Goodis novel Down There.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Short Take: Les Bonnes femmes
This review was originally published on Pol Culture.
Les Bonnes femmes, French director Claude Chabrol’s fourth feature, is a gem. It embodies the spirit of French New Wave filmmaking as much as the best early efforts of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. There’s not much in the way of plot. The film is an episodic, slice-of-life portrayal of four young women who work at a small Paris appliance store. They are a compelling bunch. Ginette (Stéphane Audran) is an aspiring singer who is terrified of being judged for her ambitions. Rita (Lucile Saint-Simon) is engaged, and her upper-class fiancé is anxious about how well she’ll fit in with his family. Jane (Bernadette Lafont) is a bored party girl who often gets in over her head with men. Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano) is a shy romantic whose poor judgment with the opposite sex ends in tragedy. Chabrol’s approach in this picture is very different from the tightly controlled, even bloodless style he became known for. The picture embraces spontaneity. It is energetic and freewheeling, and one is completely caught up in the personalities of the four women. The jazzy ambience carries one through the most mundane scenes, such as a lunchtime visit to the zoo, as well as the unfortunately pulpy climax. All four actresses give strong performances, but if there’s a standout, it’s probably Stéphane Audran. The scenes of her facing her fears about singing onstage are probably the most urgent in the film. The screenplay is credited to Chabrol and Paul Gégauff. Henri Decaë provided the handsome documentary-style cinematography.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Film Review: Le Petit soldat
This review was originally published on Pol Culture.
Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier), made in 1960, was Jean-Luc Godard’s first film after his debut feature Breathless. It’s not a characteristic effort. The picture is earnestly downbeat, straightforward, and the few moments of playfulness might strike some as lapses. If one had to glibly sum it up in a sentence, one might describe it as a Godard film for people who don’t like Godard films. One could easily see his most vehement detractors giving it a good review.
The picture is set in Geneva during May 1958, just before the Algerian War led to the fall of the Fourth Republic in France. The protagonist, Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), is a 26-year-old deserter from the French army. He lives in Switzerland as a conscientious objector. But he’s hardly free of the French government. The country’s intelligence service has tracked him down and is using his fugitive status to blackmail him into working as a secret agent. He does their dirty work for them, and he gets treated like dirt in return. He reaches his tipping point when they order him to kill an Algerian sympathizer. After he receives the assassination order, he resolves to flee to Brazil with Véronica (Anna Karina), his new girlfriend, to escape the government’s clutches.
The storyline may sound like Godard is venturing into Graham Greene territory, but Bruno lacks the moral grounding of Greene’s heroes. He’s entirely apolitical, and right and wrong for him are the same as likes and dislikes. He’s fond of the Lenin quote that “the future aesthetics are ethics.” His own values turn the quote inside out: to him, ethics are aesthetics. He likes Germany because he likes Beethoven, he likes the U. S. because he likes American cars, and while he doesn’t like Arabs, it's because they live in the desert--he dislikes T. E. Lawrence for the same reason. He doesn’t have any real moral objection to committing murder. His problem is that it doesn’t suit his self-image: he’d “feel like a loser” if he went through with it. He rationalizes his attitude with the belief that there is something more important than ideals--he doesn’t believe God has them--although he can’t articulate just what.
In many ways, Godard’s portrayal of Bruno is the flipside of his treatment of the Michel and Patricia characters in Breathless. They’re all moral idiots, but in Breathless, Godard (and the audience) was so entranced with the characters’ childlike, carefree charm that concerns over their more objectionable behavior largely fell by the wayside. Bruno is shown with a much colder and darker eye. There’s very little that’s likeable about him: he’s stolid, humorless, and abrupt with people. Likeability is left to his girlfriend Véronica; Anna Karina might be the most enchanting and fluidly expressive film actress since Louise Brooks. Godard doesn’t romanticize the Algerian sympathizers--their modus operandi includes torture, which the film graphically depicts--but it’s rather fitting when it turns out Véronica is on the Algerians’ side. She explains that it’s because the Algerians are fighting for an ideal, and the French have lost theirs; she’s at least somewhat morally centered. (She calls Bruno’s windy self-rationalizations pathetic.) It’s possible to see Bruno’s attitudes as a synecdoche for the French government’s: their ethics are primarily aesthetic as well. One example is their coercing patsies like Bruno to commit assassinations for them; they want it done, but they don’t want to get their hands dirty. By framing this portrayal of narcissistic moral apathy in a politically charged context, Godard effectively turns it into a study of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. One notes the French government was not appreciative; they banned the film until after Algeria gained its independence in 1962.
But as much as Godard’s usual detractors might appreciate the film’s straightforward narrative and reasonably unambiguous moral tone, it’s still recognizably a Godard film. Characters quote books and other authors at length. There are self-referential jokes as well, such as the bit where Bruno refers to a conversation he had with Raoul Coutard, the film’s cinematographer. Many of Godard’s formal proclivities are also present. These include his fondness for a comic-strip boldness in the shot compositions, and his use of documentary-style mise-en-scène to satirize the hyperbolic violence in Hollywood films. (The most conspicuous instance is the car chase scene, where the staging makes it abundantly clear just how stupid and dangerous it is to try to shoot the driver in one car while operating another. The gag of having the oncoming traffic continually blocking the shooter's aim is the capstone.) Godard’s partisans and detractors can both appreciate his ability to come up with effects that seem more typical of a director like Michelangelo Antonioni. One example is the heightening of the soundtrack in the train-ride sequence to dramatize the Bruno’s feelings of alienation. Another is the panning across ugly, bleakly impersonal buildings as a metaphor for societal indifference to the evils of torture. It’s hard to imagine anyone looking at this film and not concluding that Godard is a master.
It isn’t all that surprising that Godard completely retreated from the moral questions of violence and political commitment in his next film, the postmodern musical-comedy tribute A Woman Is a Woman. Nor is it surprising that he increasingly embraced a radical political stance in his films as the 1960s went on. Le Petit soldat raises uncomfortable questions about having a moral viewpoint in a political context, namely what good is it when both sides are repugnant? The film may not seem like a characteristic Godard film, but in a roundabout way, it does appear to be a key one in his development.
Reviews of other films by Jean-Luc Godard:
Le Petit soldat (The Little Soldier), made in 1960, was Jean-Luc Godard’s first film after his debut feature Breathless. It’s not a characteristic effort. The picture is earnestly downbeat, straightforward, and the few moments of playfulness might strike some as lapses. If one had to glibly sum it up in a sentence, one might describe it as a Godard film for people who don’t like Godard films. One could easily see his most vehement detractors giving it a good review.
The picture is set in Geneva during May 1958, just before the Algerian War led to the fall of the Fourth Republic in France. The protagonist, Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), is a 26-year-old deserter from the French army. He lives in Switzerland as a conscientious objector. But he’s hardly free of the French government. The country’s intelligence service has tracked him down and is using his fugitive status to blackmail him into working as a secret agent. He does their dirty work for them, and he gets treated like dirt in return. He reaches his tipping point when they order him to kill an Algerian sympathizer. After he receives the assassination order, he resolves to flee to Brazil with Véronica (Anna Karina), his new girlfriend, to escape the government’s clutches.The storyline may sound like Godard is venturing into Graham Greene territory, but Bruno lacks the moral grounding of Greene’s heroes. He’s entirely apolitical, and right and wrong for him are the same as likes and dislikes. He’s fond of the Lenin quote that “the future aesthetics are ethics.” His own values turn the quote inside out: to him, ethics are aesthetics. He likes Germany because he likes Beethoven, he likes the U. S. because he likes American cars, and while he doesn’t like Arabs, it's because they live in the desert--he dislikes T. E. Lawrence for the same reason. He doesn’t have any real moral objection to committing murder. His problem is that it doesn’t suit his self-image: he’d “feel like a loser” if he went through with it. He rationalizes his attitude with the belief that there is something more important than ideals--he doesn’t believe God has them--although he can’t articulate just what.
In many ways, Godard’s portrayal of Bruno is the flipside of his treatment of the Michel and Patricia characters in Breathless. They’re all moral idiots, but in Breathless, Godard (and the audience) was so entranced with the characters’ childlike, carefree charm that concerns over their more objectionable behavior largely fell by the wayside. Bruno is shown with a much colder and darker eye. There’s very little that’s likeable about him: he’s stolid, humorless, and abrupt with people. Likeability is left to his girlfriend Véronica; Anna Karina might be the most enchanting and fluidly expressive film actress since Louise Brooks. Godard doesn’t romanticize the Algerian sympathizers--their modus operandi includes torture, which the film graphically depicts--but it’s rather fitting when it turns out Véronica is on the Algerians’ side. She explains that it’s because the Algerians are fighting for an ideal, and the French have lost theirs; she’s at least somewhat morally centered. (She calls Bruno’s windy self-rationalizations pathetic.) It’s possible to see Bruno’s attitudes as a synecdoche for the French government’s: their ethics are primarily aesthetic as well. One example is their coercing patsies like Bruno to commit assassinations for them; they want it done, but they don’t want to get their hands dirty. By framing this portrayal of narcissistic moral apathy in a politically charged context, Godard effectively turns it into a study of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. One notes the French government was not appreciative; they banned the film until after Algeria gained its independence in 1962.
But as much as Godard’s usual detractors might appreciate the film’s straightforward narrative and reasonably unambiguous moral tone, it’s still recognizably a Godard film. Characters quote books and other authors at length. There are self-referential jokes as well, such as the bit where Bruno refers to a conversation he had with Raoul Coutard, the film’s cinematographer. Many of Godard’s formal proclivities are also present. These include his fondness for a comic-strip boldness in the shot compositions, and his use of documentary-style mise-en-scène to satirize the hyperbolic violence in Hollywood films. (The most conspicuous instance is the car chase scene, where the staging makes it abundantly clear just how stupid and dangerous it is to try to shoot the driver in one car while operating another. The gag of having the oncoming traffic continually blocking the shooter's aim is the capstone.) Godard’s partisans and detractors can both appreciate his ability to come up with effects that seem more typical of a director like Michelangelo Antonioni. One example is the heightening of the soundtrack in the train-ride sequence to dramatize the Bruno’s feelings of alienation. Another is the panning across ugly, bleakly impersonal buildings as a metaphor for societal indifference to the evils of torture. It’s hard to imagine anyone looking at this film and not concluding that Godard is a master.
It isn’t all that surprising that Godard completely retreated from the moral questions of violence and political commitment in his next film, the postmodern musical-comedy tribute A Woman Is a Woman. Nor is it surprising that he increasingly embraced a radical political stance in his films as the 1960s went on. Le Petit soldat raises uncomfortable questions about having a moral viewpoint in a political context, namely what good is it when both sides are repugnant? The film may not seem like a characteristic Godard film, but in a roundabout way, it does appear to be a key one in his development.
Reviews of other films by Jean-Luc Godard:
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Film Review: Breathless
This review was originally published at Pol Culture.
Breathless is director Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, and it’s easily his most accessible effort. The story is simple. Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young car thief, kills a traffic cop while en route to Paris from Marseilles. When he gets to Paris, he does what he can to raise enough money to flee to Italy before a police manhunt catches up with him. He calls in debts from his friends, tries to fence a car, and even engages in a random mugging. But he spends most of his time pursuing a girlfriend, a U. S. exchange student named Patricia (Jean Seberg). He wants them to skip out to Italy together, but she’s trying to begin a journalism career, and she goes back and forth over whether she wants to accompany him. She ultimately betrays him to the police, who shoot him when he tries to flee.
I don’t mind giving the story away, largely because it’s the least important aspect of the film. It functions in much the same way a canvas does for a painting: necessary, but of next to no interest by itself. Godard is far more interested in rendering the personalities, attitudes, and experiences of his two protagonists. He doesn’t build tension towards the story’s resolution. To the extent the film has a climax, it's on an epiphanic note, and while rather poetic, it’s far more intellectual than emotional.
Most viewers don’t pay much attention to the ending, anyway. Audiences are generally struck by how alive and immediate the film seems. Godard doesn’t seem to have created a story so much as he has distilled the experience of the everyday onto celluloid. The film rarely feels staged. The everyday bustle of Paris suffuses the scenes, and the characters don’t seem to be following a script so much as their own whims. The jump-cut editing emphasizes this impulsive quality. It dramatizes how, at least in modern life, perception doesn’t flow and encompass what’s around one. It perpetually shifts to what strikes one as important, and there is only peripheral awareness of everything else. Godard’s pseudo-documentary style achieves what Alfred Hitchcock claimed for melodrama: it’s like real life, but with all the boring parts taken out.
Key to the film’s appeal is the considerable charm of Michel and Patricia. It’s ironic, because they’re both amoral, destructive people. It’s not unfair to label them sociopaths. Michel is the sort of violent criminal that virtually everyone would be happy to see either locked up or dead, and Patricia, while nowhere as overtly dangerous, casually uses and discards people without any thought to the consequences. After betraying Michel to the police, she tells him she doesn’t want to be in love with him, and that she turned him in to prove to herself that she wasn’t. The prospect of his being killed or imprisoned never really occurs to her. She thinks she’s just being mean. As repugnant as some of Michel and Patricia’s actions are, one can’t view them with contempt. There’s a childlike sweetness to both of them. For them, every moment seems an opportunity to play, and for the most part, one smiles at their behavior the way one does at the antics of children. And as with children, one can’t really hold their destructive behavior against them. One knows that at the most basic level, there’s no malice behind it. At their best, Michel and Patricia are a delight, and at their worst, one just looks on and accepts.
Godard also gets one laughing at their adolescent flightiness. They are constantly trying on roles and attitudes that they subsequently reject, although that doesn’t mean they won’t pick them up later only to reject them again. During the extended scene of the two in Patricia’s apartment, Michel gets his face slapped after making a grab for her backside, but she doesn’t mind him fondling it a moment or so later. Shortly afterward, she’s back to slapping him when his hands get adventurous. The idea of being a good girl appeals to her one moment, she couldn’t care less about it the next, and then she’s back to fancying herself a good girl before she accedes to his desire to have sex. Both she and Michel are like this about everything: what they like and dislike, whether they want to be with this person or that one, and even their ambitions for the future. They don’t take anything seriously, or if they do, it’s because they like the idea of taking something seriously. One can’t help loving them for it. Whatever else they may be, they’re probably the most relaxed (and relaxing) characters in all of film.
Godard captures the charm of Michel and Patricia’s inability to commit to a thought or an attitude, but that doesn’t mean he’s not aware of its negative aspects. Those are not only the obvious harm for Michel’s victims; there is also the harm for Michel and Patricia. The film’s ending presents them as tragic figures who can’t even commit to their own tragedy. They can only go through the motions of that as well. Godard highlights this with the film’s handling of a single word: dégueulasse. It’s French slang for vomit, and to say something is dégueulasse is the equivalent of saying, in the contemporary English vernacular, that it sucks. The word is heard throughout the movie. Michel’s French girlfriend calls him it when he asks her for money, Michel uses it to refer to Patricia after she goes off to meet an editor about an assignment, and an author whose press conference Patricia attends uses it to describe his opinion of Chopin. The usage is so casual that it has no weight as a term of disapproval. And at the end, when Michel lies in the street dying from a gunshot wound, this emptily nasty term is all that comes to mind. “C’est vraiment dégueulasse / This really sucks” are his final words. He’s so offhand about everything that he can’t even find language that dignifies his death.
Godard compounds the pathos with the sick joke of having no one understand what Michel said. Patricia stands over him as he dies with the cop who shot him. She asks what he said, as she’s never encountered the word dégueulasse before. (She was out of earshot when Michel insulted her with it earlier in the film.) But the cop misunderstood him, and instead of repeating that this (i. e., the situation) sucks, the cop tells her that Michel said she sucks. She still doesn’t understand, and the film closes with her staring blankly into the camera. The terrible flipside of these characters’ nonchalance is revealed: with them, nothing matters, not even their words in their final moments.
Breathless leaves one with much to consider when looking at Godard’s subsequent films. How does he build on the marvelously immediate atmosphere he created for this picture. How does he expand on his portrayal of the mindset of young people in his time? How much further can he take his insights into the inadequacy of language and its usage? There’s also the question of whether any of his films can be seen as a culminating or epitomizing effort. Godard established himself as one of the greatest film directors with this debut, and one of the most challenging with the work that followed. He always leaves one asking what comes next.
Reviews of other films by Jean-Luc Godard:
Breathless is director Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, and it’s easily his most accessible effort. The story is simple. Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young car thief, kills a traffic cop while en route to Paris from Marseilles. When he gets to Paris, he does what he can to raise enough money to flee to Italy before a police manhunt catches up with him. He calls in debts from his friends, tries to fence a car, and even engages in a random mugging. But he spends most of his time pursuing a girlfriend, a U. S. exchange student named Patricia (Jean Seberg). He wants them to skip out to Italy together, but she’s trying to begin a journalism career, and she goes back and forth over whether she wants to accompany him. She ultimately betrays him to the police, who shoot him when he tries to flee.I don’t mind giving the story away, largely because it’s the least important aspect of the film. It functions in much the same way a canvas does for a painting: necessary, but of next to no interest by itself. Godard is far more interested in rendering the personalities, attitudes, and experiences of his two protagonists. He doesn’t build tension towards the story’s resolution. To the extent the film has a climax, it's on an epiphanic note, and while rather poetic, it’s far more intellectual than emotional.
Most viewers don’t pay much attention to the ending, anyway. Audiences are generally struck by how alive and immediate the film seems. Godard doesn’t seem to have created a story so much as he has distilled the experience of the everyday onto celluloid. The film rarely feels staged. The everyday bustle of Paris suffuses the scenes, and the characters don’t seem to be following a script so much as their own whims. The jump-cut editing emphasizes this impulsive quality. It dramatizes how, at least in modern life, perception doesn’t flow and encompass what’s around one. It perpetually shifts to what strikes one as important, and there is only peripheral awareness of everything else. Godard’s pseudo-documentary style achieves what Alfred Hitchcock claimed for melodrama: it’s like real life, but with all the boring parts taken out.
Key to the film’s appeal is the considerable charm of Michel and Patricia. It’s ironic, because they’re both amoral, destructive people. It’s not unfair to label them sociopaths. Michel is the sort of violent criminal that virtually everyone would be happy to see either locked up or dead, and Patricia, while nowhere as overtly dangerous, casually uses and discards people without any thought to the consequences. After betraying Michel to the police, she tells him she doesn’t want to be in love with him, and that she turned him in to prove to herself that she wasn’t. The prospect of his being killed or imprisoned never really occurs to her. She thinks she’s just being mean. As repugnant as some of Michel and Patricia’s actions are, one can’t view them with contempt. There’s a childlike sweetness to both of them. For them, every moment seems an opportunity to play, and for the most part, one smiles at their behavior the way one does at the antics of children. And as with children, one can’t really hold their destructive behavior against them. One knows that at the most basic level, there’s no malice behind it. At their best, Michel and Patricia are a delight, and at their worst, one just looks on and accepts.
Godard also gets one laughing at their adolescent flightiness. They are constantly trying on roles and attitudes that they subsequently reject, although that doesn’t mean they won’t pick them up later only to reject them again. During the extended scene of the two in Patricia’s apartment, Michel gets his face slapped after making a grab for her backside, but she doesn’t mind him fondling it a moment or so later. Shortly afterward, she’s back to slapping him when his hands get adventurous. The idea of being a good girl appeals to her one moment, she couldn’t care less about it the next, and then she’s back to fancying herself a good girl before she accedes to his desire to have sex. Both she and Michel are like this about everything: what they like and dislike, whether they want to be with this person or that one, and even their ambitions for the future. They don’t take anything seriously, or if they do, it’s because they like the idea of taking something seriously. One can’t help loving them for it. Whatever else they may be, they’re probably the most relaxed (and relaxing) characters in all of film.
Godard captures the charm of Michel and Patricia’s inability to commit to a thought or an attitude, but that doesn’t mean he’s not aware of its negative aspects. Those are not only the obvious harm for Michel’s victims; there is also the harm for Michel and Patricia. The film’s ending presents them as tragic figures who can’t even commit to their own tragedy. They can only go through the motions of that as well. Godard highlights this with the film’s handling of a single word: dégueulasse. It’s French slang for vomit, and to say something is dégueulasse is the equivalent of saying, in the contemporary English vernacular, that it sucks. The word is heard throughout the movie. Michel’s French girlfriend calls him it when he asks her for money, Michel uses it to refer to Patricia after she goes off to meet an editor about an assignment, and an author whose press conference Patricia attends uses it to describe his opinion of Chopin. The usage is so casual that it has no weight as a term of disapproval. And at the end, when Michel lies in the street dying from a gunshot wound, this emptily nasty term is all that comes to mind. “C’est vraiment dégueulasse / This really sucks” are his final words. He’s so offhand about everything that he can’t even find language that dignifies his death.
Godard compounds the pathos with the sick joke of having no one understand what Michel said. Patricia stands over him as he dies with the cop who shot him. She asks what he said, as she’s never encountered the word dégueulasse before. (She was out of earshot when Michel insulted her with it earlier in the film.) But the cop misunderstood him, and instead of repeating that this (i. e., the situation) sucks, the cop tells her that Michel said she sucks. She still doesn’t understand, and the film closes with her staring blankly into the camera. The terrible flipside of these characters’ nonchalance is revealed: with them, nothing matters, not even their words in their final moments.
Breathless leaves one with much to consider when looking at Godard’s subsequent films. How does he build on the marvelously immediate atmosphere he created for this picture. How does he expand on his portrayal of the mindset of young people in his time? How much further can he take his insights into the inadequacy of language and its usage? There’s also the question of whether any of his films can be seen as a culminating or epitomizing effort. Godard established himself as one of the greatest film directors with this debut, and one of the most challenging with the work that followed. He always leaves one asking what comes next.
Reviews of other films by Jean-Luc Godard:
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