Masculin Féminin [1966]

 Godard loved critiquing and deriding pop-culture, while also having left his indelible signature through infinitely quotable aphorisms, sign-posts and set-pieces. And this ironic dichotomy was perhaps most memorably discernible in his freewheeling, infectious, seriocomic, episodic and delightfully irreverent gem Masculin Feminin. It also embodied a facile mix of his early and later Nouvelle Vague sensibilities, with its playful mix of serious political commentary, witty satire, goofy fun, eccentric tonal inflections and flamboyant improvisations. As Godard so wryly opined through customary deadpan narration and intertitles, this was a film on “the children of Marx and Coca Cola”, made in “the age of James Bond and Vietnam”. Protests against the Vietnam War and imperialism, acerbic jabs against vacuous bourgeoisie, colission between counterculture and consumerism, battle of the sexes, and enchanting portrayal of callow youth, carefree camaraderie, young romance and love for cinema in a crazy and increasingly fractured world, therefore, were among its varied preoccupations. And these were accompanied by gorgeous B/W photography, catchy music, cheeky ad-libbed conversations – a deadpan interview of a thoroughly baffled beauty pageant winner on contemporary politics was particularly ingenious – and good-old jump cuts. The deliberately jagged narrative covered a group of lively Parisians – Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud in terrific form), an idealist and avowed Communist who engages in spirited dissidence amidst odd jobs; Madeleine (real life yé-yé star Chantal Goya), an alluring pop singer who Paul is having an affair with; Madeleine’s possessive roommates (Catherine-Isabelle Duport and Marlène Jobert), and Paul’s activist buddy (Michel Debord). Interestingly, there were some impish self-reflexive moments too – in one Brigitte Bardot is seeing discussing a script at a café, while in another Paul reproaches a film projectionist for wrong aspect ratio.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review can be found here. 

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Drama/Buddy Film/Urban Drama/Romantic Drama/Social Satire

Language: French

Country: France

Weekend [1967]

 The two films which book-ended Godard’s astonishing fifteen feature run that defined his Nouvelle Vague days arguably remain as his two most emblematic works too; Breathless, which shook the world of cinema like rarely before or since, announced the arrival of this rebel, prophet and polemicist; and with Weekend he spectacularly announced his explosive rapture. Flamboyant, anarchic, lurid, ribald, subversive, provocative, savagely hilarious, reflexive, culturally dense, seething with rage, and deliriously farcical, this work of stunning bravado – Buñuel meets Brecht meets Bukowski meets Warhol – can be read and interpreted in multifarious ways through its wild mix of tones, irreverent mash-up of styles, picaresque interplay between contrasting themes, darkly ingenious surrealist splashes, and riotous burst of manic energy. Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) are a bourgoise couple embroiled in respective extra-marital affairs and each conniving the other’s murder post securing an inheritance from the latter’s parents, who they’ve jointly conspired to murder. With that objective in mind they embark on a road trip that goes awry from the start and goes spectacularly downhill thereon, as they get engulfed by chaos, revolution, violence, mayhem and apocalypse. It comprised of three astounding single-take sequences – the most epic of the lot was a blazing near 10-minute tracking shot of an endless traffic jam; and then there was a glorious scene where Corinne seductively recounts a feral orgy, and a lilting sonata sequence while the camera makes multiple 360-degree pans. Deadpan static shots of two Marxist garbage men berating colonialism, oppression and exploitation, a memorably madcap act by a gloriously unfettered Jean-Pierre Léaud, and anarchic hippie revolutionaries who’ve resorted to cannibalism were just some of many unforgettable set-pieces in this unclassifiable masterpiece.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire/Marital Drama

Language: French

Country: France

La Chinoise [1967]

 Zany, playful, impish, funny, improvisational and subversive – La Chinoise brilliantly embodied the pop-art palette, political provocations and freewheeling essay form of the two more famous works with which it constituted a triptych, viz. 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her and Weekend. And, in its delirious agitprop professing hard-left “call for action”, it can also be viewed as a companion piece to the extraordinary – albeit diametrically different, tonally and formally – The Battle of Algiers. Interestingly, it also presaged the May 68 student protests, which imbued it with stirring prescience and déjà vu, despite Godard’s disarming levity, amusing infusions and a delirious sense of ambiguity. Nearly the entire film is set within an apartment temporarily occupied by a group of five Parisian college students who’ve formed an underground Maoist cell. Led by the articulate Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky; in her second film after her debut in Bresson’s minimalist masterpiece Au Hasard Balthazar and her first with her then beau Godard) and her fidgety boyfriend Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Léaud at his neurotic best), they spend time discussing politics, reading Mao’s “Little Red Book”, sloganeering, performing whimsical role plays, berating American imperialism and Johnson’s Vietnam policy, and whatnot; and, in order to put their polemics into radical action, they plan the assassination of a Soviet cultural attache. The film’s idiosyncratic exuberance was fabulously showcased by the hilarious song “Mao Mao”; it lived its Brechtian influences on its sleeves, including glimpses of its cinematographer Raoul Coutard filming; and its stunning, disarming and rambling seriousness reached its apotheosis over a fascinating discourse between Véronique and Wiazemsky’s real-life philosophy professor Francis Jeanson who was renowned for his active support to the FLN during the Algerian revolution.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Avant-Garde/Experimental Film/Political Satire/Agitprop

Language: French

Country: France

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her [1967]

 Godard’s love for pop-art, as evidenced as early as his amusing and vibrant A Woman is a Woman, attained dramatic proportions – marriage of high and low art, serious and sardonic, political and mundane, philosophic and banal – in his dazzlingly colourful, irreverent and self-reflexive 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. This duality was also manifested in the fact that he shot large sections in parallel with his sly genre exercise Made in U.S.A. (his final collaboration with Anna Karina) – for a month, he filmed the former in the mornings and the latter in the afternoons – and in its shared topic of casual prostitution with his iconic earlier gem Vivre sa Vie (incidentally, Buñuel’s masterful Belle de Jour too came out the same year). That aside, it covered an array of themes – in what might be one of his first cine-essays, blurring narrative fiction with meditations and polemics – as he delivered stinging commentary on American imperialism that reached grotesque proportions in the Vietnam War, de Gaulle’s conversion of Parisian suburbs into a modernist cityscape that many found hideous, and the vacuous, hyper-addictive culture of unbridled consumerism among the petit-bourgeoisie. These themes – in a fragmented, freewheeling, Brechtian manner, and accompanied by Godard’s voiceover delivered like a conspiratorial whisper – laced the depiction of 24 hours in the life of Juliette (Marina Vlady), a middle-class married woman, who, in order to earn something extra to buy stuff, resorts to part-time prostitution. Two moments typified the film’s impish wit – a brothel that doubles as daycare for kids; and Juliette’s kid son’s deadpan dream of twin brothers fusing into one, which made him realize that they represented the unification of North and South Vietnam.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Genre: Avant-Garde/Experimental Film/Essay Film/Agitprop/Social Satire/Political Satire

Language: French

Country: France

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg [1964]

 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – Demy’s immensely loved, breezily crafted and exquisitely staged cine-opera – can as much be enjoyed as a celebration of the Hollywood musical as it can be admired for its understated deconstruction of a genre that is at times too frothy or kitschy or escapist to be taken seriously. The latter aspect was especially interesting in how he merged the buoyancy and charm of this genre with everyday life with all its hopes and regrets, ordinary people compromising teenage dreams with muted reality of adulthood, and evocation of working-class neighbourhoods. And the way it delicately balanced the supposed artifice – albeit one where, in an unconventional formal choice, every spoken line is sung, as opposed to actors breaking into song-and-dance – with such socialist realist topics as teenage pregnancy, prostitution, and post-war disillusionment, laced this with an enchanting interplay between style, themes and tones. Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve), the stunningly beautiful girl whose practical single mom (Ellen Farner) runs a struggling umbrella boutique, is in love with Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), who works as an auto mechanic. He, however, gets drafted in the Algerian War, and his absence, along with her pregnancy and their economic woes, slowly pushes her towards Roland (Marc Michel), a wealthy, melancholic jeweler who’s fallen for her. Interestingly, Demy steadfastly centered the narrative in the titular port-town – except for a marvelous in-film reference when Roland reminisces about his lost love in Lola – so much so that characters even fall off the narrative upon moving to somewhere else. Michel Legrand’s melodious score, and gorgeous art designs that gradually transitioned from vibrant pastel shades to washed-out grays, accompanied the protagonists’ mournful coming-of-age that was sealed in the bittersweet coda.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Jacques Demy

Genre: Musical/Romantic Drama

Language: French

Country: France