Una storia americana

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.

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?

Godard's subversively titled twelfth feature is an constantly mystifying hodgepodge of film narration, images, and memorandums. Dedicated to Nick (Ray) and Samuel (Fuller), this ironically long-unavailable film in America is, technically anyway, a political noir about people acting like they're living in a movie. "You can fool the audience, but not me," Anna Karina, tells someone. This Criterion-salvaged piece, as can invariably be expected of its director, makes reference to its own forced artificiality as well as aware of that aspect of itself as the central object of notice for even the most accustomed viewer of avant-garde and experimental films: When characters talk, it's almost always to either contemplate the character of language or frankly observe the time passing.

Neon signs and electronic news ribbons proliferate. So do comic strips and film stills. Most of the characters, like Donald Siegel and Doris Mizoguchi, are named for Godard's favorite movie figures, and allusions to American movie characters are everywhere, including three from three separate films by Otto Preminger, who also has a street named for him in the movie's make-believe Atlantic City. This stunningly self-conscious political diatribe's cinephilic gags and cartoon violence smack of Alphaville.

In her final performance for Godard, Anna Karina is Paula Nelson, a P.I. swathed in an overcoat and packing heat. As The Big Sleep has an infamously indecipherable plot, one of whose many murders not even Hawks could clarify, so this is Godard's most unrelentingly unbalanced of plot convention. Crucial scenes, if you can call them that, are systematically minced right at the moment of revelation. Information in the dialogue is resolutely buried by street noise or two brash Beethoven chords, as, variantly seductive and apathetic, Paula goes looking for an ostensibly vanished lover, likely dead, in a tangled, tortuous, never elucidated international political conspiracy.

Supposedly, Godard had much more than Raymond Chandler and Donald E. Westlake on one's mind. This patchwork mingles the Americanization of French life with the widespread controversy of mid-60s France, the vanishing of Morocco's foremost leftist, a political expatriate in France and a third-world personage then akin to Malcolm X or Che Guevara, kidnapped by French police acting in cahoots with the Moroccan government, which evidently had him tortured to death on French terrain. That he disappeared while traveling to a development meeting for a documentary, made the incident even more dramatic for Godard. Supposedly, this work of sociopolitical meta fiction is an imagining that he'd not died but had hidden in the provinces, wrote to his girlfriend to meet him. When she gets there, she discovers him dead.

So the movie starts with Paula secluded in a shoddy hotel room in the characterless Paris suburb that doubles for Atlantic City, reflecting on her state of affairs while a couple of hooligans, played by New Wave regulars László Szabó and Jean-Pierre Léaud, linger portentously under her window. "Hanging out" is one of the movie's "active" (if that word could be used) factors. This awkward satire has characteristics of the sometimes fascinating, sometimes pedantic time-languishing revue that distinguished the art-house of the '60s. Early on, Marianne Faithful sits inexplicably in a neighborhood café, nonchalantly trilling As Tears Go By a cappella. But chiefly, Raoul Coutard's camera stares at the star, a statue. Frankly, you could forget all about the political and sociological vinegar and find the movie's really all about contemplating Karina's concealed grins, her dark hair, her switching clothes, and her eerie ability to turn any given shot into a fashion promo. Considering that we hear her voice-over all over, it's not unlike a Jarmusch-esque lone wolf enterprise.

Plot, to use the term carelessly, accelerates when Paula slays the irritating midget stoolie Mr. Typhus: "Now fiction overtakes reality," she self-narrates. Storytelling is leaps and bounds more complicated and theoretically brutal here as in The Big Sleep or Kiss Me Deadly. Like Marlowe or Hammer, Paula finds a succession of corpses during her mission. She also leaves a footpath of others as her own upshot, including one whom she just shoots at close range. Later on, she serves the movie's most celebrated, and loaded, line: "We were in a political movie. Walt Disney with blood." Roughly when characters named Nixon and McNamara show up as hoodlums, played by young film critics, the reel-to-reel tape recorders that have been sporadically stationary in close-up to play messages left by Paula's lover change to egalitarian discourse.

The movie is anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist, condemning miniskirts and rock and roll as manner of fascist brainwashing, but more invested in the kitschy modernism favored by the informal consensus within the mainstream of Western culture than any movie Godard made prior or since. Paula asserts that advertising is a form of fascism, representing the director. It's a legitimate grievance and an upsetting one, considering that Made in U.S.A. is a relentless commercial for itself. Perhaps the cleverest thing about it might be its title, which offers perspective on that element.

Pending this work, Godard was a nationalist for some, a populist for others, but didn't folks assert the same thing about Orson Welles? And yet for others, he was just an armchair politico. Made in U.S.A. is an opinionated exploit that's equally as sincere as a formal expression of political will, a judgmental breakdown of pop culture and a cautionary lecture in which, this time, the filmmaker has become so explicitly caught up that he felt he had to film it himself.

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.

There is no questioning the power of Godard. His cinematic talent reaches much farther than my mind could even begin to escape, and upon watching some of his lesser known films these days - his sheer imagination was something that is decidedly missed in today's film experience. Watching "Pierrot Le Fou", the vivid color, the uncontrollable ability to combine any genre into one frame, and the dedication of his actors was demonstrated. A less-fan of his "Breathless" film and more into his experimental work, "Fou" was right up my alley - yet, watching "Made in USA", I was completely flabbergasted. This film was confusing, colorful, intelligent, philosophical, brutal, and a slice of what America was producing at the time, while all the while being completely Godard. Destined never to be a favorite among purists, "Made in USA" requires more than one viewing and an accompanying owner's manual to navigate, but the final destination is worth all the work. Using Anna Karina as our guide, this spy-thriller (if I could say that) takes off with a huge step and never looks back.

Do not watch this movie late at night or while doing anything that will cause you to glance away from the screen. Every moment in this film is necessary, every word that Godard has our actors speak - while at times confusing and thought provoking - is needed to tell this dis-narrative story. Godard is a master behind the camera for this film - giving us an early glimpse as to what was in store with "Pierrot Le Fou", his bold color and well read characters (each one is always holding a book - Bravo!), are just the crust. What made "Made in USA" stand out was the obvious connections to Walt Disney, the "Big Sleep", and nearly everything coming out of the 60s in America, but what makes Godard impressive, is that one needs to search to see it. He doesn't spoon feed you a narrative that makes your heart gush at the end, Godard creates challenging cinema that will not be enjoyed by all, but if developed - if watched over time - if studied, remains important even 43 years later.

"Made in USA" is another Criterion release that looks and sounds perfectly, but - even with my discussion on how great Godard's work is - isn't the greatest release from the master. Yep, I am a Godard fan, but I am picky. I didn't enjoy "Breathless", but "Pierrot Le Fou" I hold very highly - and this - well, "Made in USA" is intelligent, but perhaps a bit too pretentious. The idea behind this film is solid, but it is the execution that had me nervous. Godard is eloquent in introducing us to certain characters and elements, but gives them names of his favorites like McNamara and Nixon that just feels weighted by symbolism and inside jokes. The viewing took place over the course of three days, not due to the diminishing subject, but because a rewind was needed to ensure that parts didn't go missing or lost. Crafting one part puzzle, one part social commentary, one part comedy is difficult - and for the beginning film watcher - this probably isn't the best film to first experience Godard. Here is what I liked - I loved not knowing. What was exhilarating about this feature was the unknown. The confusing dialogue, the menacing tape voice, the constant barrage of planes flying overhead (if that IS what that noise was), and the possible hope of knowing Richard's last name - keeps one wanting to finish, but getting there is a battle. The dialogue is either a love or hate moment. As there is no linear story, from the spoken perspective, and it is easy to get lost in Godard's cluttered words. For myself, it was at times refreshing - and at other times a disaster. Without a linear narrative, it was difficult to understand how one character fit within the scheme of events. What was happening between Paula and Mr. Typhus? Just thinking about it gives me a headache.

The scenes that stood out in this film were the bartender moments (where you could call him Paul or Bartender, but not "sir"), the pinball machine in the garage, and the billboard store room characters. These made me chuckle and see the humor that Godard was demonstrating, but the others just felt murky and disjointed. Again, I would like to state that every scene was necessary, but were they great? The imagery was spectacular - giving us the color palette that he would later use in "Pierrot Le Fou" - and the cinematography followed suit. For me, it was just the language the bogged me down. I wanted to know these characters further, I wanted to further know the story of the skulled man, and who was double crossing who. "Made in USA" is an important film, I am glad to see it within the Criterion catalogue, but it is an advanced film. The average film watcher will not like this movie, even I felt lost sometimes - but I am so very happy that I watched it.

In another review, this film was quoted as a "B-side" to the Godard cannon, and I couldn't agree more. Could I watch this movie again? Absolutely, but not right away. I look forward to re-exploring this piece of cinema, understanding what I missed, and seeing the inside moments that may have slipped by me the first time. "Made in America" isn't perfect, and I don't know anyone that can take a ten minutes of a tape playing discussing politics, but this self-proclaimed "B-side" finally has a release it deserves.

Grade: *** 1/2 out of *****