Classic Movie Review: A Married Woman (1964)

A Married Woman (1964) 

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Written by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Starring: Macha Méril (Charlotte), Bernard Noël (Robert, the Lover), Philippe Leroy (Pierre, the Husband), Christophe Bourseiller (Nicolas), Roger Leenhardt (Self), Margareth Clémenti (Girl in Swimming Pool), Véronique Duval (Girl in Swimming Pool), Rita Maiden (Madame Celine), Georges Liron (The Physician).

 

The two films Jean-Luc Godard made right before and right after A Married Woman (1964) were Contempt and Band of Outsiders before and Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou right after. All four of those are celebrated, acknowledged masterworks by Godard – but somehow this film made right in the middle of them all is usually completely overlooked, and not listed among Godard’s greats. That’s really a shame, because it’s the type of Godard film that I miss – a film that is both able to understand its main character, make her a fully realized character, and critique her and the society around her, that produced her. Godard even has some sympathy for her. Godard even has some sympathy for her – something he will lose in just a few years. While A Married Woman may not quite be at the level of some of Godard’ best 1960s output – it certainly deserves a better reputation that it has.

 

Godard was right not to cast his then wife – Anna Karina – in the lead role of Charlotte, instead opting for Macha Méril instead. Karina, a terrific actress would have been wrong for this part as a bored housewife – who doesn’t realize how bored she is. Meril is perfect in the role though – spending her morning with her lover, Robert (Bernard Noel) before returning to her husband, Pierre (Philippe Leroy). She seems to be sleepwalking through all interactions with both men – they talk and talk and talk, and if they don’t quite seem to like her, they do at least have an interest in continuing their relationship. But Charlotte has little of interest to add to the conversation. She lives in a bubble of consumerism – told by magazines how to look and act, what to buy, etc. The best scene in the film – the most famous one – is when Charlotte sits alone reading a magazine, the ads taking up the entire screen, as she eavesdrops on a couple of teenage girls, talking about their own initiation into this hetero-normative worldview that Charlotte is an expert in. She’s an expert in nothing else – unable to contribute to a conversation about Auschwitz, because she has no idea what it is.

 

Perhaps the reason why A Married Woman isn’t as well-regarded as some of his other films of this period is because it can be read as casual, condescending misogyny. Godard didn’t want to name the film A Married Woman, but rather The Married Woman – thus extending his feelings that the bourgeoisie, middle class women are all empty headed, consumerist, who know nothing else but how to consume. It is only when Charlotte finds out she is pregnant – and doesn’t know how the father is – that she engages anything approaching self-introspection – trying to figure out which man she should be with; which man she loves. She isn’t even really able to defend herself against her abusive husband – weakly telling him at one point “you didn’t need to beat and rape me”. And yet, as we see in the first shot of the movie, of her hand, that ring suggests some kind of ownership – that Charlotte isn’t her own person anymore, but property. Amazingly for Godard though – since two years later, he would dismiss the younger generation as “the youth of Marx and Coca-Cola” in Masculin Feminin, he clearly feels some sympathy for Charlotte. He doesn’t like the way she is, doesn’t approve of it – but also sees it as the deliberate byproduct of a patriarchal society – one that wants women to be like Charlotte, pliant consumers, obedient wives, sexual objects, etc. I could see how dismissing the giant swatch of women in one swoop could be read as misogyny – and it isn’t like this is the only film from this period where you could credibly accuse Godard of the same – but I think Godard does make Charlotte both sympathetic and specific – she is a real character, not just a stand-in that Godard can use to make his political points. This is the Godard that I miss – the one that can make incisive, damning political points – but also tell a story, with a real character at its core at the same time.

Classic Movie Review: Masculin Féminin (1966)

Masculin Féminin (1966) 

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Written by: Jean-Luc Godard based on stories by Guy de Maupassant.

Starring: Jean-Pierre Léaud (Paul - un jeune homme instable), Chantal Goya (Madeleine Zimmer - une petite chanteuse), Marlène Jobert (Élisabeth Choquet - la copine de Madeleine), Michel Debord (Robert Packard - un syndicaliste), Catherine-Isabelle Duport (Catherine-Isabelle), Evabritt Strandberg - Elle (la femme dans le film), Birger Malmsten (Lui - l'homme dans le film), Brigitte Bardot (Brigitte Bardot).

 

If I were to describe the plot of Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin (1966) you would probably think that the film is a fun sex romp. It is a film that concentrates on a group of young Parisians – all of whom are in love or lust with each other, and who go through the film expressing that in various ways. There is music, there is sex – there’s even a scene with a group of people in bed together, and even if they aren’t having sex, it feels like it could start at any time. And yet, the overall feeling of the film is one of melancholy – of these young people going through the motions of love and relationships, but basically not understanding any of it.

 

Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is a young man of 21, who along with his best friend Robert (Michel Debord) spends his time talking about workers rights and politics, even as it becomes clear he doesn’t really understand any of it beyond the slogans that he spray paints on various walls throughout the film. He meets and falls for Madeleine (Chantal Goya) – an aspiring pop star – and the two-start dating, even if it’s fairly clear that protestations to the contrary, Madeleine is fairly indifferent to him. One of Madeleine’s roommates, Elisabeth (Marlene Jobert) very well may be in love with Paul, and their conversations are full of sexual tension that goes nowhere. Robert wants Elisabeth, but flirting is as far as it goes. Paul tells Robert that he’d have better luck with Madeleine’s other roommate, Catherine-Isabelle (Catherine-Isabelle Duport) – although she doesn’t appear to like any of them all that much.

 

Godard doesn’t appear to like any of these characters all that much – he sees them all as poseurs and phonies – n people who have become inspired by the French New Wave films, and want to act as if they are in one, but don’t really understand them. Godard was in his mid-30s by this point – divorced from Anna Karina, and seems to think these characters are silly, superficial and shallow. He cast the great Leaud – who had already played his most famous role of Antoine Doinel for Truffaut twice – but not yet as an adult as in Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed and Board (1970), characters who may resemble Paul superficially, but who Truffaut certainly had more sympathy for than Godard does. Paul is another of Godard’s horrible boyfriends – the kind of pretentious guy who lectures you on politics and aspect ratios, and is seemingly so serious, when really, he’s just trying to get laid all the time, even if he doesn’t quite know what to do. Robert is even more condescending than Paul. And in case you think that Godard has any more sympathy for the female characters – you’d be wrong. At least his male characters feign interest in important subjects – the female characters are interested in nothing but pop music, shopping, hair and clothes.

 

The famous line from Masculin Feminin that people remember is Godard, in an intertitle, referring to the characters as the “children of Marx and Coca Cola” – a withering description of this generation who talk like communists, but act like capitalists. The more apt description though comes when they go to the movies, and Paul in voiceover says “We went to the movies often. The screen would light up, and we’d feel a thrill. But Madeleine and I were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy, Marilyn Monroe had aged badly. We felt sad. It wasn’t the movie of our dreams. It wasn’t the film we carried inside ourselves, that film we would have liked to make, or more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live”. This is a film about characters who want more, who want to live inside the romanticized vision they saw in the movies, and act as if they are – but are stuck in this hollow, empty existence.

 

Masculin Féminin represented a sort of final chapter for Godard. He wasn’t done with his amazing run in the 1960s of course – Weekend and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (a film many other like more than me) were to come out the next year. And yet, this does seem kind of like the last time his characters were characters – not merely representations of something else, not metaphors or symbols. And perhaps the reason why the switch was made is as simple as he didn’t see much there worth liking.

Classic Movie Review: A Woman is a Woman (1961)

A Woman is a Woman (1961)

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Written by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Starring: Anna Karina (Angela), Jean-Claude Brialy (Emile Recamier), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Alfred Lubitsch).

 

With A Woman is a Woman, Jean-Luc Godard’s third film, we still see Godard firmly implanted in his movie love phase. The film is a tribute to the classic Hollywood musical comedy – a plot that wouldn’t be out of place in classic Hollywood – directly referencing Ernst Lubitsch, Cyd Charrise, Gene Kelly and others. It is a film that winks at the audience throughout – with Godard and his cast referencing themselves, and the films making, their star personas, their personal relationships throughout. It is a love story of a sort – made in the height of the romance between Godard and star Anna Karina – the Honeymoon phase as it were, before things become too tumultuous – and Godard starting making films like Contempt (1963), which among other things was a thinly veiled version of their famed love affair, and its difficultly. You can tell Godard is enamored with Karina in this film – but you can also tell he doesn’t really understand her – perhaps doesn’t understand any woman – and while this is as romantic a film as Godard would ever make, it isn’t a rosy love story – he’s already too cynical for that.

 

In short, the movie is a love triangle. Karina plays Angela, a striptease artist, who decides she wants to get pregnant. Her boyfriend, Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) doesn’t want that, thus setting up a conflict between the two of them – and adding in Emile’s best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who is more than willing to do the job Emile doesn’t want.

 

Your mileage on a film like A Woman is a Woman may well vary. All the cinematic winking to the camera by Godard and company can either be charming or wearisome – and while I fall on the side of the former, the latter is just as valid. The film isn’t pretending to be is realistic – even if Godard referred to it as Neo-Realist musical – but even he had to know that wasn’t the case. The film is shot on a set, the actors are professionals, and not playing versions of themselves, and Godard is constantly drawing attention to his technique. Is there music in the film? Sure – but Godard basically offers of it, and then interrupts those snippets, sometimes dropping the sound out entirely, in ways that convince some audiences there is something wrong with the soundtrack. The strip club Angela works at is like no other strip club you would ever see – with the dancers doing simple, not very erotic dances, to small crowds of individual men who are very respectful – and after a few minutes, it’s all over, and everyone returns to their lives. Of the three actors, Belmondo is the most winking – deliberately referencing himself in Breathless, and his “friend” Burt Lancaster – as he looks directly into the camera – and when he runs into Jeanne Moreau, playing herself, asks her how Jules and Jim is coming along – the Francois Truffaut masterpiece that came out the same year as A Woman is a Woman.

 

And yet, for me most of this works for me. Godard is clearly enamored by Karina here, and the camera loves her. She isn’t playing anything resembling a real person, but she is certainly showing her comedic chops here – as she glides through the movie on her effortless charm. Even when she and Emile are arguing, it’s all done with charm – the two argue through the covers of books, showing their titles to show what they think of each other.

 

Now, of course, it’s easy to see A Woman is a Woman for what it was – a film that a genius that Godard could toss off without much thought. His style is here – there are elements here that you can still see in his films to this day, being used and experimented with here for the first time. All told, it doesn’t add up to all that much – it basically adds up to nothing to be honest – but it’s 84-minutes of the type of fun that Godard would soon grow out of – and is missed to this day.

Classic Movie Review: Alphaville (1965)

Alphaville (1965) 

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Written by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Starring: Eddie Constantine (Lemmy Caution), Anna Karina (Natacha von Braun), Akim Tamiroff (Henri Dickson), Howard Vernon (Prof. Leonard Nosferatu - aka von Braun).

 

I have never been one to question a director artistic ambitions – I want great filmmakers to follow whatever path they want to, and make whatever films they want to make – and in that regard few filmmakers in history have had the freedom that Jean-Luc Godard has had. For 60 years now, Godard has made pretty much whatever he wanted – a function, yes, that his movies have never cost a lot to make, but few Avant Garde filmmakers – and Godard has been one for decades now – get the attention that Godard does. I am both frustrated and fascinated by much of his later work – love the experimentation with 3-D in Goodbye to Language 3-D, grow weary and bored by the endless droning (often un-subtitled) of Film Socialisme for example. Still, that Godard is a genius is undeniable (that he’s an asshole, also undeniable – as Agnes Varda reminded us in Faces Places) – and the film world is richer because Godard has been able to follow his muse for decades. Still, when I watch a film like Alphaville (1965) – I imagine a different cinematic landscape – one in which Godard was able to continue to merge his philosophical interests and his cinephilia into something more, well, relatable. Alphaville shows Godard’s encyclopedic knowledge of film history at its best. It is part film noir, part sci fi, a parody of both, a film which references many of his favorite filmmakers (the Welles influence is obvious throughout) – and yet is also undeniable the work of Godard. Like much of his 1960s work – which, I’m sorry, is still my favorite period of his by far, Alphaville is wondrously entertaining, thought-provoking and profound. It’s a mixture few have ever come close to getting as perfect as Godard did during this decade.

 

In Alphaville, Eddie Constantine stars as Lemmy Caution, a kind of Sam Spade knock-off who Constantine had played in numerous French films leading up to Alphaville – and would continue to play in various forms for the rest of his life. Lemmy is an American living in France, and his latest job is to infiltrate Alphaville – a kind of “utopia” in which all of the inhabitants are ruled by a computer voice, emotions have pretty much been outlawed, and the consequences for crossing the computer are severe. Lemmy goes undercover as a reporter – apparently writing yet another puff piece about the city – but that’s not his real intention. Him being there throws everything off-kilter – especially when he falls in love with Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina) – which is something that the computer – Alpha 60 – just cannot compute.

 

Alphaville is a science fiction film, but one made with little money. Godard smartly doesn’t try to make anything look futuristic at all – he confines Lemmy and everyone else mainly indoors – in hotel rooms, hallways, etc. that look impersonal and unfeeling. Godard’s world of the future is, shockingly, still relevant today – it isn’t the path we went down, but it’s not so far away from it that is unrecognizable – and what the reliance on computers has done to humanity is accurate. Godard is able to find ways to make this supposed utopia the exact opposite – without using much in the way of budget. Residents of the city have three choices – assimilate, kill themselves, or face execution – the last of which is done in a way that would be highly inefficient in practice, but is sure as hell entertaining.

 

With Alphaville, as with other Godard films, you can complain that the film crosses the line into misogyny – and not be entirely off-base. Most of the women in the film are so called “Seductresses” – dead-eyed women, used to control men. If they aren’t that, then they are quite literally man-eating monsters. Even Karina’s Natasha isn’t entirely immune to this treatment – although she certainly becomes more of a character than anyone else.

 

Of course, as with almost any Godard film there is a lot of philosophical talk. Unlike his more recent efforts though, Godard is at least attempting to merge it into some kind of narrative here – it comes flying at you fast and furious at times, and you may or may not keep up – but hopefully enough sinks in to be useful to you.

 

Alphaville is Godard at the height of his powers – you can already feel him moving away from his earlier work, and into his later period – but the balance here is just about perfect. It is as heady as anything Godard would ever make – but also entertaining, and brilliantly structured. This is Godard at his absolute best.

Movie Review: The Image Book

The Image Book *** / *****

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Written by: Jean-Luc Godard.

 

The last feature film that the legendary Jean-Luc Godard made – Goodbye to Language 3-D – was my favorite from the ornery master in years. That was because Godard seemed to be in a more a playful mood that usual with that film, and was experimenting with 3-D imagery, in a way that so few directors have done since the technology re-emerged a decade or so back. In that film, even if you didn’t understand all of Godard’s intellectual rhetoric, you could at least sit back and see some genuine experimentation and originality – something in short supply in many films these days. So it’s with more than a little disappointment that I report that his latest film, The Image Book, sees Godard going back to being the old crank he’s been for years (decades?) now, except this time, everything is more tinged with sadness and despair. It seems like Godard thinks that humanity is beyond saving – and we don’t really deserve to be saved anyway.

 

The Image Book is basically an 85-minute montage of degraded images from other films or news reel footage, or whatever other images have struck Godard’s fancy when assembling the film. He has digitally degraded the images, so they appear not as they did originally in whatever context they were in, but as copies of copies of copies of images. The sound is more often than not deliberately out-of-sync, or altered so we aren’t hearing what we originally would. What we hear most often is Godard’s own voice as he chides the audiences, condescends to us, challenges us, or just cries out in silent despair. Seeing the film in a movie theater is the best way to see it, perhaps more for the sound mix than the images, as Godard is certainly playing with that as well – the surround sound is put to good use here, as the sound could be coming from anywhere – sometimes it confronts us head on, and sometimes from the back, as if Godard were behind you, whispering into your ear.

 

Godard’s main point – if there is one here, and it’s always tough to tell with Godard, because however much a great thinker he may be, he has never had much interest is expressing those thoughts in a clear manner for those in the audience to get – is that we don’t care – or at least, we don’t care enough. The last third of the film focuses on the Middle East – and how it has been portrayed in films, and how the Western world has exploited it – all while those same forces have never attempted to even understand it.

 

This, in the end, seems to be what Godard is saying – that the power of films and images have been misused over the years, and we don’t seem to care. Or maybe I’m misreading the whole thing, because as with everything he has done since his Magnum Opus Historie(s) of Film series, Godard’s overarching goal seems to be to provoke, chide and annoy his audience. Godard wants to let everyone else know what he thinks of them, while at the same time, remaining his fascinating enigma status as a reclusive genius. Mission accomplished, I guess.

 

As with most of the films of this latest, and last, period of Godard’s films, I find it best to let the images and sounds in The Image Book to simply wash over you. Pick up snippets here and there, piece together some thoughts on what is being seen, and discard the rest. This was hard for me for years – I tried to figure out just what Godard was trying to say, and when I failed, I resisted the films. But perhaps the best way to look at it is that Godard himself doesn’t always seem to know what he’s saying – like the rest of us, he struggles to figure out his own films – and it’s the process of trying, more than the destination, that matters.

Classic Movie Review: JLG/JLG: Self Portrait in December (1994)

JLG/JLG: Self Portrait in December (1994)

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Written by: Jean-Luc Godard.

 

Whenever I watch a film from late period Godard – pretty much anything he made starting with Histoire(s) du Cinema (begun in 1989) – I am torn between two reactions. One is that Godard is still obviously a genius – his ability to create striking, memorable images – and in particular his editing and sound design is truly amazing, and several times during the runtime of one of his films, you are struck dumb by something you see or hear. But the other part of me thinks that most of what Godard has down in that period is self-involved claptrap – intellectual exercises for an increasingly small number of people, as he looks down on everyone else who isn’t a genius like Jean-Luc Godard. Is this some of this perhaps my own insecurity – worrying that I don’t understand what Godard is talking about? Undeniably – I really don’t have any clue what he’s talking about half the time in these films.

 

In his 1994 film, JLG/JLG: Self Portrait in December is an hour long film in which Godard considers his own place in cinema history – as well as who he is as an artist at this late stage (he was in his 1960s by then). By this point, Godard had already become less and less commercial viable – something he seemed to actively court for nearly 30 years, as he more and more abandoned narrative film for avant-garde essays and montages. Godard looks morose throughout much of the film as he considers his past successes – and how out-of-sync he is now. There is also a little bit of playfulness in the film – as Godard interacts with his cleaning ladies (which you could choose to see as playful, or sexist, or perhaps both) – and then pokes at his critics who have accused him of anti-Semitism, by explaining stereo sound with a diagram, that ends up being a Star of David. And like any late Godard film, there is lot of philosophical quotes – as Godard seemingly brings up arguments, and then shoots them down in rapid succession.

 

There is much to admire about this film – and over the years, I have learned with late Godard to try not to parse it all too closely, to find out Godard’s precise meanings for everything – they’re going to fly over my head (and so be it, I guess) – but, as with much avant-garde cinema, to try to take it all in as a sensory experience. That’s probably why my two favorites of Godard’s late period are Notre Musique (2004), a brilliantly edited montage of the three kingdoms of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, and his latest film Goodbye to Language 3-D, which made brilliant use of 3-D technology, in ways I had never seen before (and my least favorite is Film Socialism – a film that seems to be deliberately visually ugly). Honestly though, I’m more than a little tired of Godard making films about Godard – and really do wish he had spent the last 30 years applying his genius to something more. But that’s a selfish complaint – just because late Godard isn’t really for me, doesn’t mean that he should listen to me. Much as I have said about the last few Terrence Malick films – when others complain that they wish he’d tell stories again, I always wonder why we want the one filmmaker doing something completely his own to be like everyone else. I didn’t much care of JLG/JLG: Self Portrait in December, but if it’s your thing, enjoy.

Movie Review: Goodbye to Language 3-D

Goodbye to Language 3-D
Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.
Written by: Jean-Luc Godard.
Starring: Héloise Godet (Josette), Kamel Abdeli (Gédéon), Richard Chevallier (Marcus), Zoé Bruneau (Ivitch), Christian Gregori (Davidson), Jessica Erickson (Mary Shelley).

Over the years, I have often struggled with the so-called “late period” films of Jean-Luc Godard – although that late period has lasted far longer, and produced far more films than his so-called “early period” in the 1960s. Those films – from Breathless (1960) to Weekend (1967)  produced numerous masterpieces and even if Godard had simply retired from filmmaking in 1967, he would still rank among the best and most influential filmmakers in history. Since then, Godard has pretty much turned his back on narrative filmmaking – going for more avant-garde films, filled with quotes, ideas, collages that can either add up to something profound, or something approaching a pretentious mess of junk. I hated his last feature, Film Socialism, although I will fully admit that I just didn’t get that film – the reviews by the films (many) champions left me confused, and had me wondering if we had seen the same film.

So when I got a ticket to see Goodbye to Language 3-D at TIFF this year, I didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps the film would be another infuriating, confusing mess – at least to me – or perhaps it would be something brilliant – as again, many said coming out of Cannes, where the film won the Jury Prize. Watching the film, I was glad (for the first time) that I had seen Film Socialism, because it had prepared me for the content of Godard’s film. They are undoubtedly the work of the same filmmaker, working in the same style. But this time, the film won me over. Everything in it was a little clearer, a little more playful and funny. And above everything else, the visuals were quite simply stunning. This isn’t the best 3-D film I have ever seen – but I do believe it uses 3-D better than any other film I have ever seen.

In general, I’m not really  a fan of 3-D in live action movies. For every Avatar or Hugo or Gravity that uses the technology brilliantly, there are a dozen movies where the 3-D is unnecessary at best and a distraction at worse – it’s gotten to the point where I avoid 3-D whenever possible. What 3-D – which as a technology is capable of doing interesting things – really needed was someone like Godard to use the technology. Never one afraid to experiment, Godard uses 3-D in new, unique and revolutionary ways – including one mesmerizing sequence when the image pretty much splits into two, and you have to close one eye at a time to see thing clearly – and then the camera slowly loops back so that image comes together again. What’s the point of this shot? I admit it – I don’t really know – but damn it all if it wasn’t one of the coolest things I have ever seen in a movie. And Godard comes up with other images, brilliantly using 3-D to layer the image in ways that quite simply left with awestruck.

So, do I really understand what the hell was happening in Goodbye to Language – what the “story” was (and yes, there does appear to be a story, about a relationship between a man and woman – or multiple couples, who may be the same couple, but may not be, and then in the second half becomes a dog’s eye view of the world for at least part of its running time)? Not really. I understood it in the moment, and the many literary quotes and allusions also somewhat make sense – at least as I was watching it, but become harder to write about and piece together when looking back at the film. If I watched the film again – or a few times – I could probably piece it altogether. But my first reaction to Goodbye to Language 3-D was one of pure awe. Godard does things using 3-D that I doubt any other filmmaker in the world could – or would even consider attempting. Perhaps I don’t appreciate Goodbye to Language 3-D in the way I am supposed to. But appreciate it I do.

My Mini-TIFF Wrap-Up

If you read my mini-TIFF preview a few weeks ago, you know that unlike most years, I wasn’t able to do a weeklong movie binge this year – having a 6 month old baby at home will do that to a guy. I was only able to attend two days on the weekend, and I decided to go to the second weekend, instead of the first – and I have to say the experience was wonderful. When you go early in the festival, the media and celebrities are all over everything, everything gets delayed and the whole thing is chaos – enjoyable chaos, but chaos just the same. When you go the second weekend, the media has all but left, there are few if any celebrities still around, the whole thing runs smoothly. The lineups are shorter, the theaters slightly less packed, everything starts on time, and you get into the theaters way earlier. In short, when you go the second weekend, it’s all about the movies not the hype – and I highly suggest anyone who can to do that next year. I know I will.

Anyway, onto the movies themselves. My 8 film weekend started with The Humbling directed by Barry Levinson, co-written by Buck Henry based on Philip Roth’s novel, and starring Al Pacino in the lead role as Simon Axler – an aging actor, who falls off the stage during a performance, and decides to retire. After a stay in a mental hospital, he retires to his large house in Connecticut. It’s there he meets – or re-meets I guess – Pegeen (Greta Gerwig) – the daughter of his old friends who he hasn’t seen since she was 10, decades ago. She always had a crush on him, and that has stopped all these years later – despite the fact that she’s now a lesbian. The filmmakers wisely turn one of Roth’s least novels – which is really a misery tour that borders on the comedic – into a full blown comedy. Pacino gives the role his all – and it’s nice to see that at least one of the great actors from the 1970s is still willing to challenge himself and not just coast (like DeNiro). It’s a broad performance, but Pacino hits all the right notes – and the supporting cast, from Kyra Sedgwick to Dianne Wiest to Dan Hedaya to Charles Grodin – all hit the right notes in rather small roles. A particular highlight is Nina Arianda as Sybil, a woman he meets in the mental hospital, who thinks Simon can kill her husband because he has experience killing people in the movies. The problem with the movie is that it never really figures out who Pegeen is – despite a valiant effort on the part of Gerwig, who plays like a caricature of a typical Roth woman (or actually, perhaps a Woody Allen woman) – although since the movie segues back and forth between reality and fantasy, perhaps that’s intentional. Still, it seems like her whole purpose is to destroy Simon – or at least come along and move the plot in whatever way it needs to go, instead of being an actual character. It’s still one of the better movies Levinson has made in a while – and one of the best performances Pacino has given not for HBO in a decade.

Another movie star showed up in Time Out of Mind directed by Oren Moverman. This was Richard Gere, who plays the homeless George in what is mainly a plotless movie. What little plot there is involves Gere trying to reconnect with the daughter he abandoned (Jena Malone) and navigating the bureaucracy of the shelter system, and the Government, as he tries to get some proof of who he is (he has no ID). Mainly though, Moverman is interested in re-creating the day-to-day life of a homeless man – often shooting Gere from a distance, observing him as most of the people he passes takes no notice of him. It’s a fascinating film, with a great performance by Gere, who has never disappeared this far into a role before, nor done something that doesn’t utilize his natural charm to this degree. It’s also kind of dull to be honest – but still well worth seeing to see both Moverman and Gere take an interesting step in a new direction for their careers.

I ended up seeing three blood soaked foreign films, of varying degrees of quality. The worst was Shrew’s Nest from Spain, directed by Juanfer Andres and Esteban Roel about a pair of sisters living in an apartment building. The older one never leaves the apartment, where she makes a living making dresses, and the younger one – who is more beautiful, has just turned 18, and may want out soon. When there upstairs neighbor falls down the stairs, breaking his leg outside their apartment, the older sister takes him in – he’s grateful of first as he was planning on disappearing for a while anyway – but soon he discovers she’s basically planning on keeping him in bed forever, Misery-style. The first half of the movie is restrained, but also kind of dull – because it’s clear everyone is holding back REALLY BIG secrets that will eventually be revealed. The second half of the film is bonkers, with the revelations and corpses piling up every five minutes or so in a blood soaked finale, which requires pretty much every character to behave in completely unbelievable ways for the sake of its “shocking” finale that was telegraphed almost from the beginning. It was only 90 minutes, but felt much longer.

There was also Fires on the Plain by director Shin’ya Tsukamoto, a remake of Kon Ichikawa’s 1959 WWII classic about dehumanization. Tsukamoto’s film hits some of the same themes, but does so in a much more blood soaked way – including a massacre in the middle of the movie which is as chaotic, violent, bloody and disturbing as any scene of its kind – until it goes slightly too far. The same can be said of the movie, which is a weird mixture of art-house sensibilities – with long portions with little or no dialogue, with the main character on his own, mixed with the splatter film violence that Tsukamoto is most known for. The effect is surprisingly effective and disturbing – but of course, falls well short of Ichikawa’s classic, which was pretty much inevitable.

The best of the blood soaked triad was Alleluia directed by Fabrice du Welz based on the infamous Honeymoon Killers, who have had several movies made about them in the past. In the film, a normal woman – a mother of young woman – falls for a womanizing conman, and even after she learns his secrets, wants nothing else than to be with him. She poses as her sister as he seduces three other rich women for their money – but completely loses it every time she sleeps with them, leading to bloody murder and dismemberment – and even a surreal musical number. The film never really attempts to answer the question of why – why this normal woman fell so hard for the conman, or why the conman lets her keep screwing up his plans – but as a portrait of obsessive love and violence its damn good – particularly the insane performance by Lola Duenas. The film is at its best when it’s at its most unhinged and surreal – and Du Welz goes for broke.

I suppose the mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi could also be described as a blood soaked foreign film – there are literally geysers of blood throughout the film, and it is from New Zealand, but unlike the other three films its goes for comedy more than anything else – and the results are delightful and hilarious – it won the People’s Choice for Midnight Madness, and is a cult film in the making. The film follows four vampires who are also flatmates in New Zealand, who have to have meetings to ensure everyone is doing their fair share of the chores, and other such issues. Waititi is wonderful as Viago, a “former dandy” who is a little obsessive about cleanliness – he asks the others to put down some paper or towels before killing a victim, so as not to get blood everywhere. Clement is even better as an older vampire – once known as Vladislav the Poker. The film plays with every vampire movie cliché imaginable – from Nosferatu to Twilight – and has great fun the entire time. In a festival where almost everything else I saw was heavy, violent and disturbing, this one was a pure joy.

The best film I saw was The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s companion piece to his previous documentary The Act of Killing – a film that left me stunned two years ago at TIFF, where it completely surprised me as I had no idea what to expect. In this film, Oppenheimer accompanies Abi, an optometrist, as he goes to visit the men who killed his older brother during the 1965 Indonesian “cleansing” of Communists. Oppenehimer returns, repeatedly, to Abi simply watching the footage of the killers as the recount, without a hint of remorse, what they did to his brother – and to his two aged parents – the mother who still cries for her lost son, to his father, who is sick and somewhat demented, but still sad. When he confronts his brother’s killers he encounters a series of denials, excuses and threats. They don’t want to stir up the past – at least not with the family of one of their victims, as they seem to have no problem revealing to Oppenheimer what they did, and no remorse for it either – as we saw in The Act of Killing. The children of his brother’s killers are perhaps even more interesting than the killers themselves – one makes excuses for her father – telling Abi he’s old and senile and doesn’t remember much, even though this follows his rather precise re-telling of what he did. Two sons of a man who wrote a book – complete with drawings – of what he did don’t want to hear anything about, and say they knew nothing. “Can’t we just all get along like the military dictatorship taught us?” one asks Abi. All Abi really wants is to see some sort of remorse from his brothers killers – and it’s the one thing they seemingly refuse to give. As a chilling scene in his son’s classroom makes clear, Indonesia still hasn’t come to terms to the reality of what was done – and they don’t seem to much care either. The movie doesn’t have the same hook as The Act of Killing – killers re-enacting their crimes in the style of various Hollywood films – but is even more devastating. I’m not sure if Oppenheimer made the film is response to some of the criticism the last one received, but if he did it refutes it brilliantly. This may be even better than The Act of Killing – which was the best documentary I had seen in years.

I ended my TIFF experience with Goodbye to Language 3-D by Jean-Luc Godard. Any regular readers know that I am ambivalent at best about almost everything Godard has made since Weekend way back in 1967 – and I have downright hated some of them, like his last feature Film Socialism. But Goodbye to Language is my favorite Godard film is years – its more playful and less didactic than Film Socialism, even though it is definitely related to that film. The film is more accessible than that film as well – even if I still think I only understood about half of it. But even when the film left me confused, it was brilliantly filmed in 3-D – giving us images that no other filmmaker would think of doing. Godard is experimenting with 3-D – and gives us some amazing images – most notably a moment when the screen splits, the camera revolves, and then comes together again. For the most part, I am indifferent at best to 3-D – since it became the norm for large scale movies, the only ones I think truly utilized it well are Gravity, Hugo and Avatar – the rest are merely unnecessary or distracting. While Goodbye to Language isn’t the best 3-D movie I have ever seen, it is certainly the most unique use of 3-D I have ever seen – and perhaps the thing the technology needed the most – a true innovator trying to do something completely different with it. I’m not as in love with the film as many are – it comes back to that only understanding half of it thing – but I’m glad I saw it at TIFF, as I am well aware that I may never get another chance to see it on the big screen in 3-D the way it is meant to be seen. If you have the opportunity, you should definitely seize it.

So that’s it for TIFF for another year. Hopefully next year, I.’ll be back to another week long trip. But this year, despite how short my stay at TIFF was, I had a great time, some saw great films – and isn’t that what TIFF is supposed to be all about.

The Best Movies I Have Never Seen Before: Historie(s) du Cinema (1988-1998)

Histoire(s) due Cinema (1988-1998)
Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.
Written by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Jean-Luc Godard has been bitter and angry for a long time about what he sees as the “failures” of cinema. The famed French director, who perhaps was the biggest name in cinema during the 1960s, has long since turned his back on narrative filmmaking, and become an avant-garde filmmaker. To be fair, had he never made those films in the early to mid-1960s – really most of his films from Breathless (1960) to Weekend (1967) – he would still be an important filmmaker in avant-garde circles. Yet, if it wasn’t for those early films, Godard would not command the respect he now does. Whenever he opens his mouth to insult a filmmaker – a favorite target of his has been Spielberg (although, most of what Godard has said about Spielberg is so outlandish and ridiculous that it masks any legitimate criticisms he may have), everyone listens. When he makes a film like Film Socialism (2010), it becomes the most talked about film at the Cannes Film Festival – where normally a film that like wouldn’t even play there (you can argue that’s either a good or bad thing). There seems to be two camps on Godard – those who think he has done very little of value since Weekend, and those who think that Godard is still a genius, still far ahead of the curve, waiting for people to catch up to him.

For the most part, I consider myself to be in the former camp. Breathless (1960), Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Pierrot Le Fou (1965) and Weekend (1967) are all legitimately great movies, and even if I didn’t think Made in U.S.A. (1966) or 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) were great (or even that good in the case of 2 or 3 Things), they was interesting and intelligent films. This period was so prolific for Godard that I still need to see some fairly major works from it –A Woman is a Woman (1961), Alphaville (1965), Masculin-Feminine (1966) – chief among them. Given how much I hated Film Socialisme (sorry, perhaps I should say I just don’t get it, but in all honesty, when I read the reviews of people who claim it to be a masterpiece, I wonder if I perhaps walked into the wrong theater, because what I saw was an incoherent mess, not some profound statement on anything) and some of his other “late period” films, I cannot imagine wanting to see them above the films he was making in the period where he made several legitimate masterpieces.

All this is a very long introduction into this piece which is about Godard’s magnum opus – Histoire(s) due Cinema, an eight part (or four part, with each part having an (a) and (b) if you want to get technical), four and a half hour epic, which he made and released slowly between 1988 and 1998. Normally, I would have rather watched one of those 1960s Godard films I still haven’t seen rather than this opus – but the film ranked in the top 50 films of all time on the 2012 Sight and Sound Critics Poll, so I bite the bullet and settled in for what I assumed would be a VERY long night.

But I was pleasantly surprised by Histoire(s) du Cinema. I’m certainly not saying that the film is for everyone – it clearly isn’t, and is more of an avant-garde art piece than anything else – but I was fascinated by the film. The film is technical marvel – a masterpiece of montage – as it brings together clips from cinema’s past, and makes startling connections, and wholly new images out of them. Yes, the film is still a long sit, and yet it was never less than fascinating – even when it enraging, which it often was as Godard’s contentions and opinions about cinema are often at complete odds with my own, or self-aggrandizing, which it is nearly constantly for parts of the movie. In Godard’s view, of course, only someone in the New Wave could tell the story of cinema history – meaning only he can – and that the French New Wave was the greatest thing that ever happened to cinema – again, meaning he was – and since then it has been a long, slow death march. He pretty much argues that cinema is already dead – but of course, only Godard is smart enough to see it.

But I can disagree with a movie, and still find it interesting – and Histoire(s) du Cinema is certainly interesting. It’s not that I didn’t know that Godard was an egomaniac when I sat down to watch Histoire(s) du Cinema, or that he wasn’t going to argue that cinema has failed – he has been arguing that for years. And Histoire(s) du Cinema is the type of film that only someone who at one point completely loved cinema could make. Godard’s movie knowledge is unquestionable, and his disappointment in cinema’s “failings” is genuine, even if I think more than a little of that disappointment stems from the fact that so few people followed him when he broke away from the mainstream.

It should be noted that this isn’t a standard issue cinema history documentary – for that, watch Martin Scorsese’s A Personal Journey Through American Film and My Voyage to Italy, both of which are excellent, both for film buffs and newcomers. No, to truly understand Godard’s film, you have to know a lot about cinema before you sit down and watch it – there were times when I was completely overwhelmed by what was being thrown on the screen. To add to the confusion, the version I saw had sparse English subtitles – but I think the important parts are subtitled (I was never very good at French in school, but I remember enough to be able to piece together much of the non-subtitled, oft-repeated phrases).

Histoire(s) du Cinema is finally a love letter to, elegy of and condemnation of cinema, from one of its sharpest minds. I may not like much of Godard’s later output, but I have never doubted that he is, on some level, still a genius – even if I think he has bought too much into his own myth (no one thinks Godard is a genius as much as Godard does). The film is never less than fascinating, even if it does begin to repeat itself after a while. At four and half hours, this is a VERY long sit – and most audiences will grow restless. I do not think this is the masterpiece that its most ardent supporters do, but for what it is, Histoire(s) du Cinema certainly deserves to be more widely seen than it has been (part of that is undoubtedly do to the rights issues of using all those old clips – this held up the DVD release for years apparently). I cannot think of too many people that I would actually recommend sitting through this film to – it requires a patient audience member, willing to indulge Godard – but if the film sounds interesting to you, than I certainly think you should see it.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Made in U.S.A. (1966)

Made in USA (1966)
Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.
Written by: Jean-Luc Godard based on the novel  by Donald E. Westlake.
Starring: Anna Karina (Paula Nelson), László Szabó (Richard Widmark), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Donald Siegel), Marianne Faithfull (Marianne Faithfull), Yves Afonso (David Goodis).

So once again, I must tackle the difficult, thorny issue of Jean-Luc Godard. Few directors can claim to have had a bigger impact on cinema history than Godard has had – even if he had never directed again, after his first film, Breathless, the same could be said. But through the early and mid-1960s, Godard made some truly wonderful films – films in love with movies themselves, yet also bold and different than anything that was being done by anyone else – even his New Wave cohorts. Not all of those films are great, but they are all interesting (and I still have a few left to see). But his 1966 film Made in USA is quite obviously a turning point for him. There is still a love of movies on display in this film – hell Godard even said one of his motivating factors in making this film was to remake Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep with Anna Karaina, his muse and ex-wife, in the Humphrey Bogart role. Yet, Made in USA also points Godard in the far more political direction his career was about to take. Shot simultaneously as 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (which personally, I thought was awful), Made in USA is as bold and different as anything Godard has ever made. But it’s not as satisfying as some of his other films – Breathless, My Life to Live, Band of Outsiders or Contempt to name a few.

The plot is pretty much incomprehensible, which is what Godard wanted. After all, if he was inspired by The Big Sleep, than it would pretty much have to be complex, as even Hawks has admitted he has no idea who committed one murder (he thought he knew, until someone pointed out to him that character had committed suicide before the murder took place). It has Anna Karina as Paula Nelson, a sort of PI, who shows up in “Atlantic City” (although it’s clearly Paris) looking to find her boyfriend, and discovering that he is already dead. She tries to piece together the clues of what happened, but Godard is simply playing with us. He doesn’t want us to figure out the plot, or else he wouldn’t end scenes abruptly, before we find out what we need to know, or obscure important dialogue with street noise and other sound tricks. The movie sets off its action when Paula kills a meddlesome man who barges into her hotel room. But if you can figure out why she killed him, or why he barged in on her in the first place, you’re a step ahead of me.

And so, what we are left with is a movie that really isn’t about its plot as much as it is about itself, and about Karina. By 1966, she had become a cinematic and style icon, and at times in Made in USA, with ever changing costumes, and the way she walks, you get the sense that you are watching a fashion show. Her bold, bright outfits are the highlights of Godard’s bold, bright movie. She is also the only character who the movie has any sort of focus on. The rest of the characters drift in and out – including Jean-Pierre Leaud (Antoine Doinel himself), who has perhaps the most hilariously over the top death scene I have ever seen.

But Made in USA also points Godard in the more political direction his films would take – both obviously, and not so. He has two characters named Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara, who claim to like violence and killing. And the whole murder plot wasn’t just a reference to The Big Sleep, but also to the murder of Ben Baraka, a Morrocan revolutionary caught by the French, and the apparent suicide of gangster/film producer Georges Figon. That might have been helpful information to know before I saw the movie, but I doubt it.

But if Made in USA isn’t as satisfying as some of Godard’s other early films, it is at least fascinating to look at and ponder. Somewhere along the way, Godard has become lost in his own pretensions, so we end up with a film like Film Socialisme (2010) that makes no sense, but has defenders who twist themselves into knots trying to explain its brilliance. Made in USA is balanced precariously between the filmmaker Godard was, and the one he would become.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

Vivre Sa Vie (1962) ****

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.

Written by: Jean-Luc Godard based on the book by Marcel Sacotte.

Starring:  Anna Karina (Nana Kleinfrankenheim), Sady Rebbot (Raoul), André S. Labarthe (Paul),  Guylaine Schlumberger (Yvette),  Gérard Hoffman (Le chef),  Monique Messine (Elisabeth).

There seems to be two main lines of thought on Jean-Luc Godard. One is that he is a cinematic genius, and as his career progressed, and he moved further away for narrative filmmaking, he became an even greater director than he already was. The people who think this, write long articles about the genius of his latest, and reportedly last, film Film Socialism. If you remember my review of that film, you know I am not in that camp, as I found Film Socialism to be a waste of time. The other school of thought is that Godard started off great in the early 1960s, and increasingly moved away from what made his 1960s output so great until he ended up becoming lost in his own pretentiousness and idea of himself. I fall more easily into that category – although I have to admit that I find some of Godard’s 1960s work unbearable as well (Two or Three Things I Know About Her comes readily to mind). Yet, when I see a film like Vivre Se Vie (1962), it makes me both happy and sad. Happy, because the film remains fresh and alive, bursting with exuberance and love of the cinema that so rarely we see on screen. And sad, because although Godard has been making films for 50 years, he so rarely again showed this same love. Like Breathless, Vivre Se Vie is a Godard masterpiece – and makes me wish he hadn’t gone off the rails somewhere along the line.

If that first paragraph has made Vivre Se Vie sound like an exciting or happy film, let me assure you that it is not. Instead, it is a film about Nana (Anna Karina), a woman who the film tries to get to know, tries to get inside of her head, and fails to. we find out early in the film that she was married until not long ago, and she has left her husband, and their daughter. The movie never explains why – perhaps because Nana herself does not know. The film simply follows her, as she goes about her life – smoking, drinking, playing pinball, working at a record store, trying to get extra money, failing, and eventually becoming a prostitute. She meets a pimp, who explains the rules of the game to her, and she follows them. She goes about her “dates” with the same lack of passion, the same bored look on her face that she does everything else in the film with.

The camera work in the film is remarkable. It is constantly moving, and yet it keeps its gaze clearly fixed on Nana. It sees her in the same way the audience sees her, studies her the same way we do as we watch her go about her life. Godard shot the movie in sequence, and didn’t do retakes – thinking that if they didn’t get it right the first time, they wouldn’t get it right the second time. So the film has an immediacy to it that is rare for films. It feels natural and real.

At the heart of the movie Anna Karina is excellent – it is probably the greatest performance ever given in a Godard film. She plays a character who is unknowable – who gives the audience just a few bare glimpses of who she really is underneath the surface that she protects herself with. She doesn’t want anyone to know her, and perhaps she doesn’t want to know herself. She doesn’t want to think, just to be who she is, make her own choices, and live or die because of them. What is remarkable about the performance, is that although Nana is all surface, we grow to love and care for her. We want her to be happy – if she can ever figure out what precisely that means – and so when the film ends in violence, as it must, it is appropriate that the camera look away. It’s too painful to see.

This is the type of film that Godard made better than anyone else did in the early 1960s. There were signs as early as the following year, with Contempt, that Godard had already grown tired of his style, and he wanted to move beyond it – although I doubt even he suspected at the time just how far beyond it he would eventually go. But no matter what I may think of later Godard, the fact remains that he is a giant of global cinema – and his place will always be assured because of films like this one.

Movie Review: Film Socialism

Film Socialism no stars
Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard.
Written By: Jean-Luc Godard.
Starring: Catherine Tanvier (La mere), Christian Sinniger (Le père), Jean-Marc Stehlé (Otto Goldberg), Patti Smith (La chanteuse), Robert Maloubier (Personne de la vraie vie), Alain Badiou (Le philosophe), Nadège Beausson-Diagne (Constance), Élisabeth Vitali (La journaliste FR3 Regio), Eye Haidara (La cameraman FR3 Regio), Quentin Grosset (Lucien), Olga Riazanova (Agent secret russe).

Jean-Luc Godard is one of the towering figures in cinema. His films of the 1960s – starting with Breathless, which remains his best film – took film to an entirely different level. Without Godard, I wonder what film would look like now – because it would be remarkably different. Yet even in those films from the ‘60s, some of them masterpieces, others not – there was a healthy dose of pretentiousness. I’ve always got the impression from Godard’s films that he thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us – and likes to rub in our faces. In the 40 years since the 1960s ended, Godard has moved further and further away from narrative filmmaking – and now comes to what he has said will be his final film – Film Socialism. The film really doesn’t say anything meaningful about socialism – it doesn’t really say anything meaningful about anything. It seems to me that Godard has made a film that is impossible to understand. Perhaps that’s the joke – perhaps somewhere Godard is sitting and laughing at all of us who went to see his film and tried to assign some meaning to it.

The film is told in three parts – the first part takes place on a cruise ship going through the Mediterranean. The second part takes place entirely at the house, and gas station next door, of a family in the South of France. The third segment heads out to the “birthplace of our humanities” around the world, but is really just a jumble of images.

I suppose that the critics who have said that Film Socialism is about the death of language may have a point. Godard has certainly made a film where the dialogue is pretty much incomprehensible and doesn’t really matter. It’s more about how the people on the cruise ship do not communicate with each other more than that they do. We see familiar Godardian characters – the Nazi hunter, the Jewish banker, the beautiful young woman with a powerful older man, the thoughtful African woman, etc. They talk a lot, but we don’t understand what they are saying. The sound of the film is deliberately crude, and any scene film on the ship’s deck results in us only hearing the sound of the wind ripping past the microphone. Most of the dialogue is in French – and Godard has provided us with deliberately useless subtitles in what he describes as “Navajo English” – which is essentially broken phrases pieced together, so we understand the jist of what people are saying, but not the actual words used. What does become clear is that Godard holds most of these characters in contempt – he sees them as shallow and superficial (which is why apparently no one showed up at a philosophy lecture Godard announced on the ship – but allow me to suggest that people on a vacation may not want to hear a philosophy lecture, and may just want to relax – which I suppose according to Godard is a sin). The second section to me remains incomprehensible – I have no idea what Godard is trying to say, although it’s obviously something about the evil of oil companies since he has a llama tied to a gas pump for the entire segment. The family, it seems, is more successful at communicating with each other than the people on the boat – but not by much. An election is coming, a reporter shows up because the parents are involved in it, but ultimately, this segment felt pointless. I’m sure someone can explain it to me. The third section of the movie calls to mind Godard’s Notre Musique – in fact it almost plays like an outtake reel from that movie as Godard “visits” the birthplace of our humanities – Egypt, Palestine, Helas, etc – and assembles a group of images that recalls the horrors of the 20th Century (Hitler and Stalin can be both be seen at various points), and of course Hollywood (why Charlie Chaplin rates a notice, I have no idea). The film ends with a final title card that simply says “No Comment”. Perhaps this is Godard’s way of saying he will not explain his film – but I almost think it describes the film as well. Godard has not really made a comment on anything in this film – at least not one that is decipherable.

Perhaps I simply do not get Film Socialism, and so like Glenn Kenny suggests, I am not really qualified to give an appraisal of it. I admit that, but I will also say that I think if that is true, then there are very few people in the world that would be qualified to give an assessment if that is the criteria. I cannot think of a single person I know who would actually get something out of Film Socialism. Now, it is not Godard’s job to make a film those appeals to the masses if he doesn’t want to – but both he and Kenny have to admit that there are few people who want to watch this film.

The bottom line on Film Socialism for me is that it never engaged me in any real way. It didn’t inspire me to go out and learn more about what Godard is trying to say, because he has made a film that is deliberately indecipherable – that deliberately holds everyone at arm’s length. Who is the audience for this film? Perhaps only Godard himself. I hope he enjoyed it more than I did.