Monday, January 11, 2008

Made in USA

by Bob Clark

Following his separation from Anna Karina, it’s easy to see how Jean-Luc Godard’s worldview grew bleaker and less hopeful from film to film. The fact that the most positive movie he was able to make in the aftermath of their divorce was the pulpy, dystopian Alphaville remains telling of just how much farther he had to fall. What’s even more evident is how the slow, painful withdrawal from his wife, actress and muse affected the cinematic technique he employed in the latter part of his first-period. From Pierrot le Fou onward, Godard’s mis-en-scene grew more and more fragmented, experimental and didactic, boldly embracing the fever-pitch of aesthetic and political radicalism as a means of nursing his broken heart.

While he would finally reach the climax of his cinematic destructivism with the bloody pastoral of Week-End, one of the key pieces of Godard’s creative arc from vibrant rising star of the New Wave to the apocalyptic poet-laureate of the New Left has long been missing from American eyes. Ever since its original theatrical release in 1966, Made in USA, had long been barred from an official release in the United States due to litigation for copyright infringement by the author of the film’s source material, the late Donald E. Westlake. That’s all changed now, thankfully, and American moviegoers can finally enjoy the film, now playing at Film Forum in the West Village, and appreciate this final feature-length collaboration between Godard and Karina.

Taken as such, the movie manages to work rather well, despite the degree to which his emotional baggage hamstrings many of his choices as director. The film rather absent-mindedly strings together a narrative of Moroccan activists, low-rent secret police thugs and a journalist’s investigation into the murder of her Communist husband in a provincial French version of Atlantic City. Godard seems content to let his actors simply go through the motions of his usual blend of pop-genre absurdism and political agitprop, as long as it provides him enough excuse to spend most of the film’s running-time devoted to lingering close-ups of Karina’s face.

And it’s hard to blame him, as she delivers a splendid performance, combining the world-weary attitude of a film noir detective with a femme fatale’s seductive smolder. With her hushed, smoky voice as melodious and deep blue-eyes as ravishing as ever in the role of a confident heroine, Anna Karina is given a very different kind of character than her usual parts in Godard’s films-- the adolescent naivety of Band of Outsiders, the robotic desperation of Alphaville or the gleeful indifference of Pierrot le Fou. For the first time in their collaborations, Karina plays not the part of a girl or a damsel in distress, but of a mature, capable woman.

Besides Karina’s charms, Made in USA has plenty of other assets working to its advantage. Raul Coutard may not have quite as many locations and set-pieces as afforded to him in previous and future productions, but the widescreen compositions and primary-color cinematography he offers up remain accessibly stunning, as always. And the rest of the cast might lack such stellar players as Jean-Pierre Belmundo or Eddie Constantine, but Karina’s co-stars provide a worthy group of foils to her steely-nerved protagonist (especially Laszlo Szabo and Jean-Pierre Leaud as a pair of backstabbing policemen on her trail).

Sadly, if there is a reason the film flounders, it’s thanks to the director himself, and his passive-aggressive approach to the project. Most of the movie, especially in its meandering first half, operates on a logic so transparently makeshift and impersonal you almost expect the script to start copying routines from the previous Godard vaudeville. The film itself recycles many of its own content, frequently doubling takes and repeating different scenes, shots and lines of dialogue in a way that doesn’t suggest a meaningful repetition of ideas and themes. Rather, it just feels like Godard was looking for a way to pad the film’s length with extra footage of his lost love.

Most telling is the way in which Godard violently inserts himself into the proceedings as the recorded voice of Karina’s deceased husband, spouting off Communist propaganda. By making the connection between his ex-wife and his ex-wife’s character as plain and unavoidable as possible, he superimposes his own marital drama onto what might otherwise be an interesting examination of the Ben Barka affair and the ties between America’s pulpy, self-indulgent pop-culture and international quagmires, sabotaging political commentary with soap-opera. It turns much of the film itself into a mere MacGuffin, an excuse for Godard to shoot home-movies of Karina.

Still, it’s hard to argue the filmmaker’s outlet to express his emotional difficulties, no matter how many feelings appear to be hurt along the way. Once their separation was finalized, each of Godard and Karina’s subsequence feature works together all feel something like an extended farewell period to a fruitful creative and emotional relationship. If Alphaville is a love-letter and Pierrot le Fou is a swan-song, then Made in USA might best be understood as an angry, half-lucid and sometimes eloquent emotional breakdown, the point where the bitterness of unrequited love far outweighs the lingering flavor of bittersweet days past. Once Godard got that howl of a movie out of his system, only the scorched wasteland of Week-End awaited him.