Salon.com > Jean-Luc Godard

“Rubber”: The ultra-meta killer-tire movie

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:30:00 +0000

Yeah, "Rubber" is, to some degree, an imitation 1970s exploitation film about a killer tire who makes people's heads explode, after the fashion of the early David Cronenberg movie "Scanners." But despite what you may have been told on the Internet, it isn't quite a knee-slappin' romp and a high-spirited cultural pastiche, with lots of ho-ho-ho and hee-hee-hee. OK, we do see our vulcanized antihero rolling down a desert back road to the strains of the '70s smooth-soul hit "Just Don't Want to Be Lonely" (someone will want to know this: It's the Blue Magic version, not the higher-charting single from the Main Ingredient). That's pretty funny, but it comes with more edge than you'd expect. Perhaps that results from the scenes in which characters in the movie try to poison the audience, try to convince other characters that the story is a ridiculous fiction, or break the fourth wall to deliver lectures about the meaninglessness of cinema -- lectures that are themselves meaningless. Yeesh!

Juliette Binoche on her new Tuscan-seductress role

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:01:00 +0000

In "Certified Copy," the first Western film from the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, Juliette Binoche plays a high-strung French journalist, whose name we never learn, who takes a visiting English author on a car trip through Tuscany. Ostensibly, she wants James (played by British opera singer William Shimell, in his film debut) to see a famous 18th-century forgery of a Roman painting, one so good it is called the "Original Copy." His book, you see, is a theoretical art-history text arguing that for practical purposes there is no difference between a copy and an original.

But even before the journey begins, the journalist's 10-year-old son has joked that she's decided to fall in love with James, and her behavior around him is oddly imperious and demanding. When a cafe proprietor in some picturesque village makes the obvious assumption -- that she and James are married -- Binoche's character pounces on it: It's been 15 years, my husband works all the time, I never see him, we fight a lot. James returns from making a phone call to persons unknown (perhaps his real wife or girlfriend) and gradually gets dragged into the game. As the pair continue their odyssey through a Tuscan afternoon, sparring like a couple who really have been together 15 years, the movie's real question comes into focus: How does a forgery or copy of a relationship compare with the so-called real thing?

Clouzot’s “Inferno”: The greatest film never made?

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 01:01:00 +0000

What went wrong when Henri-Georges Clouzot, the meticulous craftsman behind such terrific '50s thrillers as "Diabolique" and "The Wages of Fear," set out to make a more experimental and personal film called "Inferno" in 1964? It's easier to say what went right with this big-budget story of madness and sexual jealousy, which was almost nothing. The result was one of the most famous unfinished films — or tournages maudits, in the wonderful French phrase — in the history of cinema.

So in some ways it's frustrating to sit through Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's documentary "Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno," since it's a film about another film that doesn't actually exist. It's like watching Les Blank's "Burden of Dreams" without ever getting to see Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo." But this is such a fascinating exploration of artistic self-destruction and hubris that I didn't find myself worrying about that. Besides, from the partial reconstruction attempted by Bromberg and Medrea, it's by no means clear whether Clouzot's "Inferno" (it could also be translated as "Hell") would have been a masterpiece or a disaster.

“Breathless”: Rebel postcard from the past

Sat, 29 May 2010 18:01:00 +0000

In one of the innumerable in-jokes and film references buried in Jean-Luc Godard's freewheeling 1960 Paris gangster fantasy, "Breathless," fellow filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville — one of the directors Godard was trying, and failing, to emulate — appears in a cameo as a misogynistic novelist named Parvulesco. Interviewed at Orly airport by Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American gamine with Lois Lane aspirations, Parvulesco says his greatest ambition is "to become immortal ... and then die."

That's what happens in the movie, of course. It's what happens to Michel Poiccard, the vain, philosophical, impossibly sexy hoodlum played by Jean-Paul Belmondo who becomes Patricia's lover and is betrayed by her. Michel compulsively models himself on photos of Humphrey Bogart and is more like a movie archetype himself than a recognizable human being. (Or rather, through the complicated backward magic of "Breathless," he does seem like a human being — one who has assembled his personality from pop-culture archetypes.)

Cannes: Godard, still alive and still baffling

Tue, 18 May 2010 15:30:00 +0000

CANNES, France -- Jean-Luc Godard's "Film Socialism" was so boring in theory that the British journalist sitting next to me fell asleep before it even started. Seriously. I glanced over at the guy during the opening credits -- which look amazing, and suggest once again that Godard would have made a great graphic designer or adman -- and he was pitched over in his seat, looking approximately as if he'd been shot. During the 100 or so minutes that followed, there was audible snoring in my section of the Théâtre Debussy, Cannes' second-largest venue, and a steady stream of walkouts, at least 50 or more in the aisles I could see.