By Keith Uhlich
[Immediate Impressions are same-day responses to first-ever viewings. Not to be taken as rounded critique or final word. More a first step on a journey. Comments and dialogue encouraged.]
[Made in U.S.A. opens at Manhattan’s Film Forum for a two-week run on January 9th, 2009. New 35mm 'Scope print. Click here for screening information. Viewed on December 18th, 2008 at 12pm Film Forum press screening. Lead image taken from Filmbrain's Like Anna Karina's Sweater.]
Texts and images (ideologies) collide in Made in U.S.A., but this seems Godard’s perpetual project. If resolution comes, it’s through the emphasis of a particular object/subject’s mysteriousness—in the way, say, Marianne Faithfull effectively resolves a roundabout discussion in a bar (paraphrase: “a door is more than a door”: onward to and beyond infinity) by singing, a cappella, “As Tears Go By.” The repeated progression: The literal meaning of a thing is called into question; Godard overthinks the problem, relishing its Fibonacci-esque nature; the camera (via Coutard) plumbs the depths of a face (or—as in the last, breathless sequence—a background landscape) in counterbalance/counterpoint, retaining and restating cinema’s essential mystery of faith.
Another mystery: the murder plot, grafted onto the widescreen/color palette from a novel where even the author (Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark) is not himself, much as, in the film proper, “Mizoguchi” is not the filmmaker, but a guitar-strumming, Japanese musician named Doris (Kyôko Kosaka), onto whose corpse is grafted a Beethoven T-Shirt (as simultaneously resonant and hollow, in its representation, as a Che bauble). But perhaps that’s speaking too literally, only humming the familiar bars of the tune in question. “Ruby Gentry” and “Daisy Kenyon,” after all, are paged via loudspeaker in a wet-dream satirical spa/gymnasium (one of the bluntest aural/visual barbs); doesn’t mean they’ll show up, any more than those unseen planes that sonic boom overhead (always obliterating, ‘long with those damned ringing telephones, the last name of Paula Nelson’s (Anna Karina) missing paramour Richard P…) will drop the atom bomb. But the threat/promise remains: the borders are permeable, even in this “Atlantic City” that feels like a prison, its inhabitants bouncing off of each other (and the various complots) like the pinballs in the machine in the auto garage where Jean-Pierre Léaud (as “Donald Siegel”—so credited; never, I believe, stated) meets his spastic demise.
Too easy to weight Made in U.S.A. to the personal: certainly it bears the scars of the Godard/Karina breakup, but it’s more than that; as it is more than a politicized response to the Mehdi Ben Barka affair; as it is more than a flippant dismissal of American foreign policy (signified by two Cahiers critics, Jean-Pierre Biesse and Sylvain Godet, playing “Richard Nixon” and “Robert McNamara”). Godard himself assumes the (entirely vocal) role of Richard P…, yammering on about Lefts and Rights, forcing Paula (and Karina) to a final reckoning (where a revolver, upstaged by a woman’s shoe in the film’s first scene, comes to its full, destructive potential). Her tear-stained face, post-shootout with Paul Widmark (Laszlo Szabo) and David Goodis (Yves Afonso), is at once revenge realized and reconciliation attained, though the concerns are as much global as personal. Godard gives the penultimate thought to an actual journalist (Philippe Labro: subtly poking at Paula’s affiliation with Radar; confidently dissecting “never changing” political polarities) and the gorilla-in-the-room final line to Paula. The foreground drama ends on a query, while the Gallic hills and highways stretch to eternity. FIN.
Keith Uhlich is editor of The House Next Door.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Immediate Impressions #1: Made in U.S.A. (1966)
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6 comments:
An interesting way of approaching the ever-present problem of how to write about Godard's densest films -- I like the fractured, free-associative quality of this. I find that I always start sounding like Godard whenever I write about him. This isn't one of my favorites among his films, but I think it's interesting to think of in conjunction with the other film he made simultaneously, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. It's as though, making 2 films at once, Godard channeled different aspects of himself into the 2 projects: USA gets the (fragmentary) narrative and playfulness with genre, 2 or 3 Things gets the philosophical voiceover and tendency towards abstraction. The latter is far more successful -- it's one of his masterpieces -- but this is still a quirky, intriguing minor work.
Awesome! Can't wait to see it at the film forum!
It kind of hurst to read this, since I have no way of seeing Made in U.S.A. right now. Perhaps the Film Forum release means it will be reaching DVD soon?
This House visit is also frustrating in another regard - you guys put up way too much interesting writing for me to catch up with, so for a while I've pretty much ignored the site. But you've lured me in again and now I see entries on Godard, Vertigo, the Sesame Street characters picking up Hitler, and I'm hooked again.
The least I can do is lure you in return, so on the subject of Karina, let me say I included her in my recent 20 Actresses post at The Dancing Image, in which I accompanied each star's name with a clip of them in their full glory (Karina's was from Le Petit Soldat):
http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/2008/12/shine-on-you-crazy-diamonds_15.html
Keep up the good work.
Ed,
How would you rundown Godard's 60s films in terms of likes and dislikes? I'm wondering if I'd like Made in USA.
I find that I love Le Petit Soldat, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, La Chinoise, Week End (which I haven't seen in years), and especially Masculin Feminin, which may be my favorite film of all time.
That I find Contempt & My Life to Live very intriguing, if not as immediately appealing as the others.
That I've grown to appreciate Breathless much more than I originally did, though it's taken a few viewings to change my opinion of it as overrated.
And that Pierrot le fou, 2 or 3 Things, and Les Caribiniers largely leave me cold, while A Woman is a Woman I find charming, but pretty much just some amusing fluff.
I wonder where Made in USA will fall in this general scheme.
"I find that I always start sounding like Godard whenever I write about him."
This made me think of Pauline Kael, on Band of Outsiders:
"If I may be deliberately fancy: he aims for the poetry of reality and the reality of poetry. I have put it that way to be either irritatingly pretentious or lyrical - depending on your mood and frame of reference - in order to provide a critical equivalent to Godard's phrases. When the narrator of Band of Outsiders says, 'Franz did not know whether the world was becoming a dream or a dream becoming the world,' we may think that that's too self-consciously loaded with mythic fringe benefits and too rich an echo of the narrators of Orphee and Les Enfants Terribles, or we may catch our breath at the beauty of it. I think those most responsive to Godard's approach probably do both simultaneously."
I love that review.
MovieMan,
It'd be very hard for me to rank Godard's 60s films very definitively; I don't know if there's ever been a more consistent and prolific period for a director. My absolute few top tier favorites are 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Masculin feminin, A Married Woman, My Life to Live, and Alphaville. Really, though, I think most of the films he made in the 60s are worthwhile. The only ones I'd rank slightly lower are Le petit soldat, which is good but kind of uncharacteristic, and Les Carabiniers, which is probably Godard's only failure of the period. I actually more or less agree with you about Breathless too, mainly because it's hard to approach that film today in the same mindset as people saw it upon its initial release: it has so altered the fabric of the movies that it is difficult to realize how world-changingly revolutionary it was. It's a raw, inventive debut that contains the seeds of his later work.
So I don't know if you'd like Made in USA, but I'd rank it somewhere in the middle of his 60s films, myself.
MovieMan -
Most of the Rialto re-releases that play at the Forum find their way to a solid DVD release. I think you'll be in luck.
That said, Made in USA is kind've a bore. And I dig Godard.
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