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The feminine city, the psyche in the new metropolis, cf. Il Deserto rosso. The protagonist is the performer or vice versa, "actors should quote" according to Brecht and so does Marina Vlady on her high-rise balcony. "Leçons sur la société industrielle." The Paris of construction cranes and bulldozers, a mutating medium for the mutating landscape. Part-time hooking, just something for the middle-class wife to make household ends meet, her clueless husband (Roger Montsoret) marvels at how she stretches the budget. Dusk to dawn, tour of boutiques and garages and brothels that double as daycare centers. "Beauté" on a panel, tattered and backwards. "Why all these signs that make me distrust language and submerge me in meanings, drowning reality, not freeing it from the imaginary?" Jean-Luc Godard, poet-biologist, ruminating in whispers—the reinvention of the Vertovian film-essay is the objective, nothing less than "the advent of conscience" is the hope. Objects and bodies and thoughts made visible, stunning arrangements in Eastman Color and Techniscope. The battlefield of a shortwave radio set, the crackling pulsar of a cigarette tip, the churning cosmos of an espresso cup. "Not dead yet" is the heroine's self-description, a typical afternoon gig has her naked with an airline bag over her head for the john with the stars and stripes on his chest. Pax Americana, "we invented the jeep and napalm." An invocation of Faulkner, the prismatic strangeness of a car wash, Vlady's crinkling smile for the camera following a 360° turn. Dolts amid books, café dialogues scored to pinball machines. "People never really talk in movies. I wanted to do that with you." Godard's Sixties magnum opus, both culmination and turning point, dense as can be. "Back to zero," the boxed commodities on the grass like a maquette of buildings as well as a cemetery. The great analysis is Akerman's in Jeanne Dielman. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. With Anny Duperey, Raoul Lévy, Claude Miller, and Juliet Berto.
--- Fernando F. Croce |