Month: May 2008 (Page 15 of 17)

A juicy piece of cold war history that’s also a job of work to watch, this 1967 feature from the ultimate aesthetic bomb thrower of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard, deals with a group of young people from well-to-do backgrounds sharing an apartment and, between lengthy philosophical, political, and artistic discourses, planning terrorist acts inspired by China’s Communist Chairman Mao. Led by a “Little Red Book” quoting actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud, “The 400 Blows”) and his winsome, but even more ideologically committed girlfriend (Anne Wiazemsky, Godard’s wife at the time), it’s clear this seriously naïve group isn’t, in John Lennon’s phrase, going to make it with anyone, anyhow — but boy do they talk about it. Never very comfortable with ordinary dramaturgy, Godard, a fanatical far leftist at the time himself, toys with avoiding it altogether here. The film is mostly a series of intense conversations touching on long dead controversies and rift that were then current among Europe’s more extreme left, leavened with bits of impish humor and cartoonish, primary-color-fueled compositions (lots and lots of red, naturally) courtesy of the director and his great cinematographer, Raoul Coutard. Godard’s next film was probably his masterpiece — the compelling, freaky and hilarious “Week End” — but it also famously proclaimed the “end of cinema.” The destruction of conventional, watchable cinema was already largely in practice here. (For all the visual rock and roll dazzle of “La Chinoise” with none of the work, see the snazzy trailer.)

Click to buy “La Chinoise”

What do you do when you’re not yet 40, the world’s most celebrated cinematic renegade, you’ve made your masterpiece (1967’s “Week End”), and it ends with the words “end of cinema?” If you’re Jean-Luc Godard, the Johnny Rotten of the French New Wave, you try to prove it by making movies that dispense with traditional meaning entirely. Still an oddity nearly 40 years after its release, “Le Gai Savior” (which means something like “The Joy of Knowledge”) is an interminable, exquisitely filmed, cinematic conversation between two archly doctrinaire Marxist students (Julie Berto and New Wave stand-by Jean-Pierre Leaud). The subject at hand is language as the enemy of the extreme social change that they advocate. The dialogue takes place entirely on an empty, darkened stage and examines the very notion of language, while being interspersed with a collage of random material and bizarre and often irritating sound effects and narrations by Godard himself. Nearly unwatchable for most of its length, it is also all but impenetrable. (Godard scholar Colin MacCabe has written that Godard’s films from this period “address an ideal audience.” I guess I’m not a member of that audience.) It is also, like Godard himself during this period, horribly politically obtuse. If only he had known that the puritanical, repressive, murderous Maoist Chinese government he so admired — despite his fierce opposition to these same tendencies in the West — would, within a couple of decades, be enabling many of the world’s most rapacious capitalists.

Click to buy “Le Gai Savior”