Made in USA

Nothing is every straight-forward in a Godard movie and MADE IN USA is probably as baffling as they get! It's a bizarre tale that confounds logical dissection but if the weirdness of the story and structure sometimes make it a trial to watch, the beautiful late 60s colour photography and the dazzling Anna Karina offer considerable compensation! Quite why Godard wastes so much screen time on a tape recording of left- wing rhetoric can only be imagined. If it was to make a political point, that simply gets lost by overkill and makes one reach for the fast- forward button.

The often curious soundtrack features a passing jet aircraft (or is it an express train?) which always obscures the surname of Karina's mysterious, deceased lover in a fashion that Tarrentino late used to obscure the name of the'The Bride' in KILL BILL.

What's it all about? No idea! But the film, or maybe the style, certainly the luminous Karina, does somehow get under your skin and even though I found it hard to endure on a first viewing I'm increasingly keen to watch it once again . Amongst the mind-boggling strangeness I'm sure I must have missed something vital....now, where is that DVD?

There's no filmmaker from the time that makes his influence more obvious, Hollywood and French semiotics, also no one who is more original in creation than Godard, but as to the use and power it has we'll have to see. To face a Godard film is to face the mind of its author after all, it's always so revealing.

It seems the real inspiration behind this was the disappearance of a prominent Moroccan leftist leader in Paris, Ben Barka. One can imagine the scandal caused at the time, how much it said about France and the West, especially to someone like Godard who would be attuned to receive it.

The first thing to glean then is that instead of filming the outrage, the obscuring of truth and malaise, using fiction, Godard reverts back to image and cinema, about fiction. To that effect he plucks a potboiler story from a book about a woman who travels to a coastal town where her revolutionary lover has told her to meet him only to find him mysteriously dead, but instead of filming the mystery and noir conspiracy, Godard films a disjointed tapestry of image and citation.

There are many of these, quotes, abrupt cuts and insertions, ruminations on camera, agitprop played from tape-recorders, all first of course Godard's fooling with cinema to see what it is made of, but moreover his oblique way of delivering the obscuring of truth, the disjointed nature of living in a world where people can mysteriously disappear and we can only grasp at fictions. As more of an afterthought he can joke that this knot of indecipherable plot is his version of The Big Sleep.

More fascinating is what all this shows of Godard. There's a bourgeois intellectual in him, that side of him he would run away from after Weekend, who wants to present his view of a concave reality, but none of it deep, transformative or unsettling, always thinly exposing thin artifice. There's of course talk of Disney and Bogart, there's a Rue Preminger, an inspector Aldrich. Tarantino- isms.

But also a spiritual side of him, a burning desire to transcend the clutter of narratives and mind; at one point Anna Karina whispers about how she would rather have nothing instead of everything as a way of reaching the absolute, it's this absolute that likely he chased in the chimera of politics and beyond. He doesn't know yet that this nothingness is not only another thought or another belief but a cessation of thought, a suspension of disbelief. He would later.

It's this other Godard who is a gentle soul, contains the child fascinated by image, the poet fascinated by love, perhaps not the philosopher troubled by being which was only more thought stood in his way. This side is as stifled here, unable to pierce through the cutouts, as it was after Weekend when he wasted his talent in things like Pravda, and was only really let flourish in the 90s, his transcendent period when you must find him again.

Made in U.S.A. (1966)

** (out of 4)

Jean-Luc Godard's homage to American film noir has a mysterious woman (Anna Karina) trying to figure out who killed her former lover. The woman travels throughout France questioning various men trying to figure out who was behind the murder while the viewer tries to figure out why they're bothering watching the film. There's no question that Godard is a legend of the screen but there's also no question that many, many people hate him. Hate's too strong of a word but I do admit that I think the director likes to be frustrating and the more people he makes mad I'm sure the happier he is. The story itself really isn't all that interesting and I found it funny that Godard had said in interviews that he was influenced by the Humphrey Bogart classic THE BIG SLEEP. The two films have very little in common and I'd say there's also very little homage to the classic noirs of the 40s and 50s. For the most part the film succeeds in being weird but like most Godard movie it's still well-made no matter how silly, boring and stupid it gets. I think what I liked most about the film were the colors that Godard uses on our main character. When we first see her she's wearing a multi-color dress and throughout the movie her wardrobe is clearly the most interesting and entertaining thing on the screen. I liked the way Godard used this colors to really light up the scene just like filmmakers would use shadow and fog to bring to life their noirs. The story itself I found to be very uninteresting and there wasn't a single second where I cared what was going on and I certainly didn't care who killed the former lover. I'm sure some Godard fans would say that was what the director was going for and I'd personally believe this but at the same time I just don't fall into the group who believes you can be pointless and unconventional and make it entertaining. The performances are pretty good for what they are but none of them really jump out at you. The film has fun mentioning earlier films and we even get Bogart's name thrown up and one character is named Richard Widmark. MADE IN U.S.A. is a film that I'm sure has some fans but I found it rather hard to sit through even though it's well-made.

In 1966 Jean-Luc Godard was approached by producer Georges de Beauregard, who said that he had some money he needed to spend and asked if Godard could make a film on very short notice. Godard said sure, and proposed adapting a pulp crime novel (Donald E. Westlake's "The Jugger"). But when Godard made the film, which would get the title MADE IN U.S.A., he did everything possible to break out of a straightforward adaptation, using the novel as a mere skeleton over which he could explore other themes that interested him.

Paula (Anna Karina), a journalist, goes to a small town where her estranged boyfriend Richard has died in mysterious circumstances, surely murder. Determined to get to the bottom of things, she takes on the air of a hardboiled detective, wielding a pistol and wearing a Bogartian trenchcoat. She meets the doctor who did the autopsy and has a run-in with the police, but mainly we see her tangled up with two gangsters, played by László Szabó and Jean-Pierre Léaud.

Godard maintains just enough conventional dialogue and action to let the viewer know where we are in the crime novel's plot, but most of what transpires before the camera must be understood as only abstract metaphors for what would have happened in the book. The interaction between his characters mainly has other purposes. They have absurdist conversations with a great deal of wordplay. They allude to French politics in a time when Godard was worried about the compromised values of the French Left and the spectres of fascism and consumer society. The Ben Barka affair, where a Moroccan dissident was murdered in France in 1965 with the apparent involvement of the French security services, looms very large over MADE IN U.S.A., almost elbowing Westlake's original story out entirely. As if aware that he had stripped the plot down to such a degree that he now had too much time to be filled, he gives little asides like Marianne Faithful singing "Tears Go By" a cappella in a cameo and Kyôko Kosaka strumming a guitar and singing in Japanese.

This is not one of Godard's best films. For one, Godard reused many of the elements of his masterpiece PIERROT LE FOU from the year before. PIERROT LE FOU was itself assembled as sort of a collage of shots from Godard's prior films, which worked well as a wonderful summing up of his early career. But when he does the same with MADE IN U.S.A., it is to greatly diminished effect. But even if this is weak by Godard standards, it is nonetheless a moving experience. Shot in colour and in Cinemascope, this is a feast for the eyes. The very best of what the 1960s had to offer in terms of fashion and product design is on hand here and it just jumps of the screen. The image feels electric. (It is a pity that Criterion's edition is only on DVD, as a Blu-Ray would have yielded even greater pleasures.) Godard's longtime cameraman Raoul Coutard gives us some elaborate long takes that impress. And of course it's Godard's last major celebration of Anna Karina's beauty and poise, which really was something for the ages, still stunning half a century later.

So Godard is not for everyone. I need to preface things here with that. Godard is such a polarizing figure some folks actually get angry at not just the director, but also with the people who enjoy his work. I've actually been accused a few times of simply pretending to dig the guy by those who didn't have the patience. But, for my money, when Godard was in his power (ie the Sixties) no one could touch him.

Made in USA, so Godard claims, is a remake of the Big Sleep. But, and it should be noted up top, I don't think we can believe him. Part of the fun is dealing with how he will lie to you, treat you with contempt, and/or in general mess with your head. There are constant interruptions in the film, Godard forces you to face the fact you are watching a film and to size it up constantly. Godard doesn't exist to watch on auto pilot; he wants you to analyze the act of viewing. It can be infuriating, especially when he removes action sequences or very awkwardly names characters/places "Otto Preminger" or "Richard Widmark." The political statements get a little heavy handed as well, though treated with humor.

As much fun as I find the film, and this entire period of Godard, watching a film like this or Pierrot Le Fou or 2 or 3 Things About Her or Weekend is work. You are expected to be actively involved. If you want to be told a story or feel like you are looking into another world, maybe Made in USA is not for you. And that's cool, these films are obnoxious and pretentious. But it can be extremely rewarding if you are willing to admit you may not "get" chunks of the film and maybe enjoyment will only kick in after thinking about the movie for a couple days. That sounds like faint praise, but Made in USA is an audacious, bold, exciting film that makes you confront what you always took for granted in classic Hollywood.