I said Goddamn, kilogram! 2009 is shaping up nicely already. Case in point?
(1966) “Walt Disney with blood.” Trenchcoated
Anna Karina arrives in Atlantic City
(apparently a provincial French town) to track
down boyfriend Richard P… (phone, plane
or car noise constantly blots out the last
name), only to find... And then the bodies
start dropping, amid encounters with the
mysterious, height-challenged M. Typhus,
his nephew David Goodis (a character, not
the Shoot the Piano Player author), Goodis’s
singing Japanese girlfriend Doris Mizoguchi,
characters named “Richard Nixon” and “Robert McNamara,”
while being shadowed by Jean-Pierre Léaud and László Szabó’s
“Paul Widmark,” with a break for a Hegelian bull session in
a bar, punctuated with the real Marianne Faithfull warbling
“As Tears Go By.” Made as a favor to his cash-strapped producer
Georges de Beauregard, and filmed simultaneously with
Two or Three Things I Know About Her,
this ostensible adaptation of a story by
American crime writer Donald Westlake
was Godard’s farewell to his muse/ex-wife
Karina, never filmed more glamorously, as
she changes from one colorfully Mod ensemble
to another, posed against starkly colored
backgrounds and shot (by New Wave legend
Raoul Coutard) in a succession of giant, haunting
close-ups. But it’s simultaneously an extremely
metaphorical and narratively disjunctive
treatment of the notorious disappearance/murder — still unsolved
— of exiled Moroccan leftist Mehdi Ben Barka and Godard’s
own way of suggesting a vast Cold War conspiracy. Dedicated
to “Nick [Ray] and Samuel [Fuller], who taught me about image
and sound” and virtually unseen in this country due to rights
issues, this is Made in U.S.A.’s very first U.S. release in 35mm.
“Godard’s hymn to
vulgar modernism.” –
J. Hoberman. “The many
shots of Anna Karina, with their wide variety of mood — each
a different pose, angle, expression — serve as a catalogue of
remembrances. The close-ups are the most expressive ones
in color that Godard has made to date.” – Richard Brody. “The
chance to see Made in U.S.A. on the big screen again provides
an opportunity to rescue movie art and revive film enthusiasm.”
– Armond White, New York Press. “Godard continually cuts
the ground from under our feet… every narrative element is
analyzed into tiny movements, and then recomposed, somewhat
in the manner of classical Cubism. There are sequences like
mosaics gone mad.” – Richard Roud. Color; Approx. 90 minutes
1:00, 2:50, 4:40, 6:30, 8:20, 10:10
1:00, 2:50, 4:40, 6:30, 8:20, 10:10
Bless you, Rialto and Film Forum, and a happy nouvelle year to everyone.
