Vivre Sa Vie (Criterion)

Jean-Luc Godard’s fourth film marked a significant new direction for young turk director, away from the impassioned sketchiness of his furiously directed first films and into the realm of carefully composed scenes and formal visual strategies. Developed to showcase his wife and muse Anna Karina (they were on the verge of breaking up), the film follows the journey of shop girl Nana (both a reference to the Zola novel and an anagram for Anna) from frustrated aspiring actress surviving on the generosity of her dates to professional prostitute. Karina isn’t given a glamorous treatment here, not like in the playful musical A Woman is a Woman, but the camera adores her in her simple shop girl clothes and Louise Brooks “Lulu” bob and Godard directs her to the performance of her career, giving a humanity to this shallow girl. It’s not just the famous close-up of Karina, with tears streaming down her cheeks, intercut with Falconetti in Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, but her distinctive body language, her distracted behavior around her “dates” and furtive response to a police interview.

Godard makes it a mix of character study, social commentary and street tragedy broken into twelve distinct tableaux (the full French title is Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux), many of them composed of carefully arranged long takes by Raoul Coutard. On the one hand it’s a provocative portrait of social and sexual politics (at one point the soundtrack reverts to a recitation of laws on the business of prostitution) directed with Godard’s distinctive gift for counterpoint and dramatic disassociation, on the other a moralistic tale of a shallow, emotionally reckless young woman ultimately punished for her ambitions and infidelities.

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Lionsgate releases the inaugural Blu-ray releases of international classics in its “StudioCanal Collection” and it goes for the gold standard with definitive editions of Ran, Contempt and the original The Ladykillers.

I’m no expert in the technical details of converting European digital masters to American standards, but it appears than many of the problems that crop up in adapting PAL masters to NTSC DVDs are not an issue for Blu-ray. The frame rate is different but the lines of resolution are standard for high-definition across borders and, thanks to the technological advances in high-def TVs and Blu-ray players, region-free discs from Europe will play on American machines, which have the ability to adjust for frame rate. That’s prologue to acknowledging that these Lionsgate discs are in fact struck from StudioCanal’s digital masters (the folks at DVD Beaver, who are relentless about these things, have compared the Lionsgate Blu-ray editions to the European pressings and found them to be, with one exception, exactly the same) and StudioCanal has made an effort to create definitive editions for these films. Which means, not only are they freshly, beautifully remastered for Blu-ray with great care, but they are filled with substantial supplements worthy of the films. StudioCanal seem to be emulating Criterion’s commitment to fidelity and respectful tribute to their cinema classics and even the engineering of simple, uncluttered, quickly-loading menus. They don’t bother with flashy graphics on the screen. It’s all about the movies, and they are great.

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I had my issues with Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen (see my review here), but those issues aside, this is a superhero film like nothing you’ve ever seen on the screen before. The idea of costumed superheroes into the real world of global politics wasn’t necessarily new when it was written in the early and is certainly not now, but the execution of the graphic novel pushes every element of the conception to mythic and apocalyptic dimensions while acknowledging the psychosis driving so many of the characters. Watching the film again, this time less wedded to the original graphic novel and more open to the temporal storytelling of the film, I found it a more satisfying experience. And part of that satisfaction comes from the expanded canvas of Zach Snyder’s “Director’s Cut,” which runs 24 minutes longer with added footage that serves character and story rather than spectacle.

The most obvious additions are the death scene of Hollis, the original Nite Owl (it’s a beautifully executed scene that perfectly translates the scene from the novel), and scenes of Nixon and his cabinet contemplating a first strike as the cold war moves closer to going nuclear. (No, the pirate comic is not added back in – and if you saw the abomination that came out as an animated version of “Tales of the Black Freighter” then you’ll be glad its not here – but you do see a few glimpses of the pages of the comic book and the characters around the news stand). But just as enriching are the little character bits laced through the film (especially Rorschach, perfectly embodied by Jackie Earl Haley right down to his throaty, phlegmy “hrrrmmm”), and the added length provides more time to reflect on the characters, their motivation and their fractured psyches: not just the schizoid conviction and moralistic hysteria of Old Testament avenger Rorschach and the sadistic psychosis of The Comedian, a brutal Fascist beating and murdering whoever he can under the facade of patriotism, but the growing disconnection of Dr. Manhattan and quantum logic that makes him both everywhere at once and tied to the moment of human experience, and the God complex and false piety of Ozymandias, who manages to profit from his plan to save mankind while putting on a show of complete altruism and pious regret for the people whose “sacrifices” made his plan possible (aka justification for killing anyone and everyone his plan calls for). It’s more compelling than exciting, a thoughtful film swirling with metaphysics and meta-storytelling, and I find that those dimensions come through even better on home video, which is well suited to slower narratives filled with novelistic detail. The longer cut delivers just that.

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My feature review of the DVD release of Jean-Luc Godard’s Une Femme Mariee is now running on Turner Classic Movies online.

Subtitled “Fragments of a film shot in 1964,” Une Femme Mariee, Jean-Luc Godard’s modern portrait of love and sex in the media-saturated sixties, is a collage of a life of a young wife having an affair. It would seem a perfect role for Godard’s wife and muse, Anna Karina, who had been the star of four earlier films, including Vivre sa vie and Band a parte, but they had recently separated after she had an affair with the co-star of another film. In her place he cast Macha Méril as Charlotte, the married woman of the title, and it’s no coincidence the brunette beauty resembles Karina, down to her stylish bangs. Charlotee, like Karina, she is a beautiful young woman married to an older man and having an affair with a actor. Godard had come up with the script idea earlier but it turned partially autobiographical by the time he started scripting, becoming his portrait of a world where, in the words of one critic, “Karina could leave him.”

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While Godard continues to explore cinema language, trying to communicate life in a media saturated consumerist society, Une Femme Marie is also an intimate portrait of young woman so alienated from her life that she does not seem to realize how unhappy she is. Charlotte is a product of her environment, giving in to her consumerist impulses driven by the cacophony of advertising around her and practically a commodity herself (the ideal of woman as seen in the ads) desired by her husband and her lover. She’s in a marriage disintegrating out of a lack of communication and an affair from which she is increasingly detached. Godard has a sympathy for her as a victim of her culture, and traces her path to self-awareness and seriousness as she ponders her pregnancy and weighs her affair against her marriage. It is also Godard’s most visually handsome film to date, shot in creamy cool black and white by longtime cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who helps Godard create a sense of emotional distance in even the most intimate scenes of lovemaking and pillow talk.

Read the complete review at TCM here.

My review of the 1965 New Wave omnibus film Six in Paris, recently released on DVD by New Yorker, is up at the Turner Classic Movies website.

The omnibus film – a feature made up of original short films by different directors, organized by a theme or a place – flowered in the sixties, especially in Europe, where directors of international repute were gathered to contribute short films on a variety of themes. Films from Boccaccio ‘70 (1962) and RoGoPaG (1963) to The Witches (1967) and Spirits of the Dead (1968) brought together the cream of European directors, and even today the omnibus film occasionally resurfaces, as with Paris Je t’Aime, comprised of 18 shorts by 18 directors shooting stories in 18 separate neighborhoods (the “Arondissements”). You can trace the inspiration for that particular cinematic love letter to the city of lights directly back to Six in Paris, a film produced by Barbet Schroeder and directed by six of the most interesting and distinctive young filmmakers working in France in the 1960s. The French New Wave had exploded in the late fifties, when Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge brought a breath of cinematic freshness and stylistic excitement to the largely staid French film industry. Barbet Schroeder, who was born in Tehran to European parents, grew up in Central Africa and Colombia, and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, had been an integral part of the movement. His ambition was ultimately to direct, but the filmmaker found his greatest contribution to the vibrant film scene as a producer of Eric Rohmer’s early films.

The inspiration for Six in Paris came from Schroeder, who hit upon the omnibus format as a way to work with most exciting young filmmakers in France and to explore the possibilities of shooting with new lightweight 16mm cameras. “It was the beginning of 16mm with direct sound,” he explains in a new interview on the DVD, and he hoped that the new technology would offer the young filmmakers the freedom of shooting quickly and spontaneously, on location and in the streets. Schroeder approached six directors he wanted to work with and offered them the challenge of making a short film in this new filmmaking paradigm. They had carte blanche to develop their own stories, so long as it all took place within a single neighborhood of Paris. It was something of a revolutionary idea, as even the low-budget productions of the French New Wave had all been shot on 35mm. The idea of mixing documentary and fiction techniques was primary in his Schroeder’s mind, and each director took up the challenge with essentially the tools but his own distinctive approach

Read the complete piece here.

Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the most important film director of the 1960s, began the decade with his feature debut Breathless, a scrappy, free-spirited, cinematically audacious take on the B-movie crime genre. By the end of the sixties, he had all but rejected commercial cinema for politically pointed commentaries and film essays like Sympathy For the Devil and Le Gai Savoir.

Smack in the middle of the genre goofing and cinematic game-playing of Godard’s earlier sixties film and the consumer satire and cultural deconstructions of his late sixties films lies Pierrot le Fou. Not that there was some sudden turn in direction; Godard embraced both sides throughout and they blur in so many films of this era. But Pierrot feels like a perfect midpoint (whether or not you could even objectively measure such a thing) in the way that it bounces between the flippant play of moviemaking fun and the social commentary on the modern world.

My extended review/overview of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and Criterion’s new 2-disc edition is running on Turner Classic Movies online. Here is another excerpt: Read more »

“I’m not a miracle worker. I’m a janitor.” – George Clooney as “Michael Clayton”

It’s an Oscar preview on DVD this week, led by Michael Clayton, nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (George Clooney), Best Director and Best Original Screenplay (both Tony Gilory).

George Clooney simmers as Michael Clayton, a legal “fixer” who works behind the scenes of a powerful New York law firm, in Tony Gilroy’s smart, sharp legal drama. When he’s sent to clean up the moral meltdown of the firm’s leading litigator (Tom Wilkinson), he unwittingly stumbles into a corporate conspiracy with reverberations that could kill him. This description makes “Michael Clayton” sound the kind of adrenaline thriller that made screenwriter Gilroy’s name (namely the “Bourne” espionage thrillers, which Gilroy scripted with a certain realpolitic intelligence), but it’s much more of a chamber drama where characters wield dialogue like precision weapons. Gilroy directs with a cool hand and an underplayed sense of drama, letting the words and the performances carry the film.

Supporting actors Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson earned Oscar nominations as well. My complete DVD review leads my MSN DVD Column this week and is archived here.

 

Tommy Lee Jones is up against George Clooney in the Best Actor category for his turn in Paul Haggis’ In The Valley Of Elah.

Charlize Theron co-stars as the sole female detective on the civilian force and his only ally through the slapdash investigation and jurisdictional tug-of-war. Haggis drops exclamation points after his symbolic gestures and muddies his message more than once, but at its best the film tells a good story with moments of chilling eloquence.

I previously reviewed the film at the Seattle P-I here.

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“Why must there always be a story?” asks a director (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) attempting to create a film of beautiful images, modeled on the masterpieces of western art, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion (1982). Of course he’s speaking for Godard, who returned from his self-imposed video exile with this lush production. Perhaps the most physically beautiful of all of Godard’s films, he uses cranes, dollies, an elaborate set, and a vivid palette of rich colors to suggest the styles of the great European directors. But there must be a story, so the fictional director flits between his rich lover (Hanna Schygulla) and a working class protester (Isabelle Huppert) while agonizing over his film. This framework seems like an afterthought, but perhaps that’s the point: who needs a story when you have these amazing images?

Passion makes its DVD debut in Lionsgate’s new Jean-Luc Godard: 3-Disc Collector’s Edition, reviewed here in my DVD column:

 

“Passion,” perhaps his most physically beautiful film to date, launched a whole new phase in his career, where he played with ideas of human relationships and cinematic representation with the tools and techniques of his video work. This new three-disc set features four films making their respective DVD debuts.

The other three features are First Name: Carmen (1983), Detective (1984), and Helas Pour Moi (aka Oh, Woe Is Me, 1993), and the disc features the half-hour documentary “Jean-Luc Godard: A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma,” with film critics and historians Kent Jones, Winston Wheeler Dixon and David Sterritt.

Also new on DVD this week is a new collector’s edition of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment:

After striking screwball gold with “Some Like It Hot,” Billy Wilder cast his eye toward the modern urban romance in a corporate culture, circa 1960, and came up with a sad and sweet story of adultery, opportunism and compromise. Jack Lemmon is the everyman who, struggling to break out of the pack of insurance adjusters, lends out his bachelor apartment to a group of cheating executives for extramarital trysts. He gets his promotion and trades the revolving door of sleazy execs running through his place for just one recurring tenant: big boss Fred MacMurray (who plays the biggest jerk of his career with cool hypocrisy).

And Sergei Paradjanov’s debut feature Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) makes its DVD debut this week, available as a single-disc special edition or in a box set with the director’s other three feature films.

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