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Columbia's Torch Lady, flickering titles, Legrand's score "for the last time (?) on the screen." Winter in Paris, nothing to do but plan a robbery. Lanky Kafka (Sami Frey) and squat Rimbaud (Claude Brasseur) play Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in the street, their vacillating accomplice is the saucer-eyed maid (Anna Karina), "une fille romantique." The triangle forms in English class, Shakespeare is translated while one student sips from a concealed flask and another asks how to say "a big, one-billion dollar film." (The quote on the blackboard is attributed to Eliot, though "Classique = Moderne" is clearly scrawled by Jean-Luc Godard.) The house by the river and the wardrobe full of money, Napoleon on the banknote smiles at the heroine (cf. Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue). The fellas read about genocide on newspapers, the gazelle runs across muddy fields to feed Rajah, a disinterested circus tiger. The caper is set for nightfall, "in keeping with the tradition of bad B thrillers." Godard's airiest jaunt, the offhand enchantment of a trio of amateurs suspended between pulp illusion and scruffy reality. The boys wear black fedoras and pinstripe suits, the girl hates everything except nature, a song comes on the jukebox and suddenly they're characters in My Sister Eileen, say, shimmying and snapping while the narrator ponders their thoughts. "He wonders if the world is becoming a dream, or if the dream is becoming the world." Not quite a minute of silence, under ten minutes at the Louvre. Corot views, Jack London anecdotes, a poem on the subway. "Neither limits nor contradictions" for the would-be hoods, nevertheless a locked door defeats them. The "CinemaScope and Technicolor" opus promised at the close is Wong's Days of Being Wild, surely. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. With Chantal Darget, Danièle Girard, and Ernest Menzer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |