Une femme est une femme

1961 Director Jean-Luc Godard

This is Jean-Luc Godard's deceptively sardonic tribute to the Hollywood musical comedy.

An exotic dancer decides that it is time for her to have a child. When her lover refuses to commit to the decision, she turns her romantic attention to his best friend. This being a Godard film, the straightforward story serves as a framework for improvisation and stylistic experimentation, allowing for odd interludes and unexpected images.

Like Alphville, this romp away from dense intellectualism that characterise the later Godard works this film fails on a number of levels. As a pure satire of the dross that was being churned out by Hollywood it is overlong; as a homage to the same machine it is banal. The musical score is jarring and the acting is hammed and stilted. It's quite painful to watch and requires real perseverance to see through to the predictably disappointing end. One to avoid unless as a cure for insomnia.

Passion

1982 Director Jean-Luc Godard

This film is a major part in Jean-Luc Godard's ongoing investigation of the relations between painting and cinema and uses innovative forms to explore political and economic questions.

The plot, if it can be called that, is very simplistic. A director is shooting a film whose scenes are all reproductions of paintings by Goya, Valasquez, and other European masters. Production comes to a halt when his producers refuse to increase his budget until he explains the film's story to them. Meanwhile he is ending an affair with the wife of the manager of the hotel where the film's cast and crew are staying. In a sub-plot a factory worker attempts to unionize her fellow employees.

The story of Passion is elliptical and incomplete. It is a means of presenting a collection of scenes and images on related themes. This kind of story would become the hallmark of Godard's later career. This film marks the reunion of Godard with director of photography Raoul Coutard, who shot many of Godard's films of the 1960s. The cinematography is key to understanding this difficult film in which how an image is shot is as important as what it depicts. Godard and Coutard favor shots that begin as open, disorganized framings and become painterly compositions as the people and things in them move.

Pierrot le fou

1965 Director Jean-Luc Godard

This is Godard’s mischievous, free-associative tenth film. It falls more into the Breathless, Band a Part,  Le Petit Soldat genre, in that there is a discerable story to follow, rather than his more experimental efforts, taking the simple and well tried boy meets girl format.

He a rakish, unemployed adman choking on consumerist jargon and bourgeois conformity, she a happy-clappy coquette with unspecified links to an underground military faction. Each is an impulsive, alienated, despairing soul who finds solace in the other’s desire for chaos and withdrawal. They flee Paris for the south of France in a hail of gunfire and Gauloises. They converse in disjointed, inhumanly droll patter, break  into song, duff up gas station attendants and eagerly concoct a new civilisation on a deserted beach. Then, as their relationship begins to fray, it all goes horribly wrong.

Basing his film ever so loosely on Lionel White’s pulp crime novel ‘Obsession’, Godard inventively drapes genre pastiche, literary references, flash inserts and cheeky agitprop over a robust ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ like framework to deliver a film which, in spirit, feels like both the sum total of his past work and an exhilarating sign of things to come. It’s a wild-eyed, everything-in-the-pot cross-processing of artistic, cinematic, political and personal concerns, where the story stutters, splinters and infuriates its way to an explosive finale.

Made in U.S.A.

1966 Director Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard directed this brightly colored, pop-art homage to American crime cinema, which somehow finds room for commentary on leftist politics and the corrupt nature of advertising.

Paula Nelson is a mystery woman who used to be involved with  an outspoken Communist and has been linked to the murder of a foreign agent. Paula wants to silence him before he starts making trouble for her, but she can't find much hard evidence that's he's still alive outside of a recently discovered tape recorder that plays his recorded rants on current political issues. While speaking with a small time hood who knows about Paula's relationship, shots ring out and suddenly the hood is dead. As Paula tries to find a way to get rid of the body, she tries to discover who killed him and why, as a pair of lackadaisical hoods follow her around Paris.

Filled with references to American genre cinema this was the last film Godard would make with his one-time wife Anna Karina. The flimsy plot was loosely adapted from the novel The Jugger by Donald E. Westlake , who wasn't paid for the rights and prevented this film from being released in the United States until after his death in 2008.

Le Petit Soldat

1963 Director Jean-Luc Godard

This controversial spy-romance tale by Jean-Luc Godard was banned from release in France for three years because it refers to the use of torture on both the French and Algerian sides during the Algerian struggle for independence.

The story focuses on Bruno Forestier, played by Michel Subor, a young, disillusioned man who becomes involved in politics, yet in spite of the fact that he stands up to torture and commits murder because of this involvement, he does not have deep political beliefs. Also featured is his lover played by Anna Karina, the then-wife of director Jean-Luc and appearing in her first film, as a motivating factor in Bruno's behavior.

This early film, looked at in the context of Godard's later, more militant work, is at once naive and fascinating. Seen in sequence this film marks a definite step in his progression.

Detective

1985 Director Jean-Luc Godard

After several years of making films to please only himself, Jean-Luc Godard produced The Detective. Not to be confused with Gordon Douglas' vastly superior 1968 film of the same name. Not that there's anything so blase as a linear plot or appealing characters, but at least some of Godard's isolated vignettes are accessible this time around.

Set in the Hotel Concorde at St. Lazare, the film is set in motion when miserably married Nathalie Baye and Claude Brasseur attempt to collect a debt from mob-plagued boxing manager Johnny Hallyday. Meanwhile, hotel detective Jean-Pierre Leaud tries to solve an old murder case. These two gossamer plot strands are used to tie together Godard's scattershot views on modern life, with emphasis on the voyeuristic potential of the recent video-camera boom.

The director dashed off The Detective to raise money for a film he truly cared about, the controversial Hail Mary and it shows. This film lacks the flair and panache that Godard is capable of and repeats the ploy of a reversible number leading to a mistaken killing that he used in Le Petit Soldat in 1963.

Slow Motion

1980 Director Jean-Luc Godard

This film whose French title is "Sauve Qui Peut (la Vie)" is pessimistic but visually stunning and marks Jean-Luc Godard's return to cinema after having spent the 70s working in video. It is an examination of sexual relationships, in which three protagonists interact in different combinations.

The film presents a few days in the lives of three people: Paul, a television producer; Denise, his co-worker and ex-girlfriend; and Isabelle, a prostitute whom Paul has used. Denise wants to break up with Paul and move to the country. Isabelle wants to work for herself instead of her pimp. Paul just wants to survive. Their stories intersect when Paul brings Denise to the country cottage he is trying to rent and Isabelle comes to see it without knowing that the landlord has been her client. The film is broken into segments entitled "The Imaginary," "Commerce," "Life," and "Music." Each of the first three sections focuses on one character and the last section brings all three characters together.

This complex film is often closer to an essay than a story; it uses slow motion and experimental techniques to explore questions of love, work, and the nature of cinema. Sauve Qui Peut (la Vie) was Godard's first film with his frequent collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville, who edited and co-wrote the film.

Breathless

1960 Director Jean-Luc Godard

This is Jean-Luc Godard debut feature film and one that would grab cinema by the scruff of the neck.

One of the seminal films of the French New Wave, this is a story of the love between a small-time hood wanted for killing a policeman, and an American girl who sells the Herald Tribune along the boulevards of Paris. Their relationship develops as he hides out from a dragnet.

Godard developed his now famous techniques: location shooting, improvised dialogue, and a loose narrative form. In addition he uses his characteristic jump cuts, deliberate "mismatches" between shots, and references to the history of cinema, art, and music. Much of the film's vigor comes from collisions between popular and high culture: Godard shows us pinups and portraits of women by Picasso and Renoir, and the soundtrack includes both Mozart's clarinet concerto and snippets of French pop radio.

When Breathless was first released, audiences and critics responded to the burst of energy it gave the French cinema; it won numerous international awards and became an unexpected box-office sensation. It is as fresh today as it was then and a joy to watch.

Bande à part

1964 Director Jean-Luc Godard

Based on Dolores Hitchens' novel Fool's Gold this is one of Jean-Luc Godard's most pioneering films. Many of the techniques perfected here went on to become the defacto way of doing things. This is a set piece in any serious cinema student's curriculum.

It tells the tale of three disaffected youths who plan a burglary with deadly results. The alienated young trio is marvelous, particularly Anna Karina, and the early scenes of their clearly overdeveloped fantasy lives are splendidly handled. Of note are the race through Le Louvres and the now famous Cafe dance routine.

Something of a companion piece to Godard's classic À Bout de Souffle, its young characters have the same odd mixture of fatalism and starry-eyed naivety that is, by turns, appealing and tragic. Trivia buffs should note that the film gave its name to Quentin Tarantino's production company (A Band Apart), and several of its scenes are echoed in his Pulp Fiction.

La Chinoise

1967 Director Jean-Luc Godard

Not one of Godard's most popular films. La Chinoise quickly gained the reputation of a head film, best appreciated when the viewer is stoned. In these days, the audience for this sort of film is generally straight, which may be why it has seldom been shown in recent years. It must be remembered that it is ostensibly a satire. The redeeming scene is on a train when the heady students meet a real revolutionary, who's down to earth point of view puts their bourgeois rantings into sharp perspective.

Godard's then wife Anne Wiazemsky plays a philosophy student who commiserates with the four members of her campus Maoist group. They are so taken by the external trappings of their cause; the posters, the Little Red Books, the by rote chantings, that they seem not to grasp the true meaning of their political persuasion. Nor do they give any thought to the long-range ramifications of their terrorist activities.

Non-fans of Godard will get migraines by the director's perverse refusal to film even the simplest sequence in a linear, logical fashion. I was tempted to recommend avoidance but on revisiting I think it does capture the naïve student idealism of that time rather well.

Alphaville

1965 Director Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc's foray into the world of science fiction.

He probably shouldn't have bothered. The basic premise is sound: A mission to assassinate the inventor of a fascist computer that is controlling a planet. It has good merit but what follows is trite and banal. The atmosphere is very "film noire", which is at odds with its science fiction setting. The external shots are blatantly in a french city, possibly Paris. The execution sequences are laughable. The dialogue is stilted and the acting is lamentable. This renders the film quite painful to watch.

It is odd that Jean-Luc released this. His other work, on the whole, is excellent and ground breaking but, alas, he completely missed his mark with this one.