Prénom Carmen

Carmen is a part of a terrorist group. Her uncle Jeannot (Godard) lends her his seaside apartment. Carmen and her group try to rob a bank. She gets tangled up and falls in love with security guard Joseph. She escapes with Joseph handcuffed to her back to uncle Jeannot's apartment.

This is not an action thriller. It has some surreal touches. The most striking thing is the explicit sexual content in this movie by director Jean-Luc Godard. It's done without sexuality. It's Joseph forcing his masturbation on Carmen in the shower. It's not the most compelling thriller. It's also not surrealistic enough to be interesting. It has a lot of different elements. Some work better than others.

Prénom: Carmen follows a young woman as she falls in love with a security guard who works at a bank she and her friends rob. Hiding in a house near the sea, they share a love that is marked by the impossibility of it to be. The film has some wonderful images, music and scenes, but my main problem with it is that I don't know who these characters are, I never connect with them. We have a truly beautiful love story in front of us, but one that feels really empty and rather forced.

A scene that had the potential to be heartbreaking (the scene with the television) remains as a rather laughable and pretentious one. This isn't the actors' fault, actually the performances are excellent, mostly Maruschka Detmers' as Carmen, but it is Godard's fault for not deepening at all in the characters. They come together, they break up, they try to return, but I don't care whether they end up together or not.

The film though has some wonderful recurring images, mostly the string quartet that plays Beethoven often softly often aggressively as the relationship goes through different stages. Two trains cross each other coming from different directions when the lovers come together or apart and constant images of the waves at the sea are also some other recurring scenes. All these images are extremely beautiful, as are all the angles from the normal scenes of the film. The lights are all very carefully thought of and the film, despite its slight pretentiousness and the little interest we have for its characters, manages to be very entertaining and has a hilarious bank robbery scene. Godard also appears as probably the most interesting character. He plays himself and lives in a mental hospital for being the only completely sincere person in the film and doing and saying whatever he wants all the time.

Prénom: Carmen is a surreal impossible love story with wonderful performances and direction, an engaging soundtrack and a love story we don't care about.

Rating: 2.5/5.

I found it very interesting to see a new, different movie made out of an old story (Carmen). It is not easy to follow Godard and hence it may take several views of the films to understand all details including plot, dialogues and philosophical remarks and the result is it makes you reflect about it and makes you become an actively involved viewer. A Godard movie is like modern art introducing new standards in story telling, and so for someone used to and expecting a scheme F Hollywood entertainment movie it is probably a frustrating experience. I found the actors did a good job. I think the nakedness of the lead actress relates to the kind of relationship she (Carmen) has with her lover, which is based on a strong sexual, magnetic and obsessive attraction. I found the cinematographic/photographic work of the movie very beautiful and the music fits nicely in.

I've seen this once, which isn't really enough, but I found it the most sheerly enjoyable of Godard's later works.

A kaleidescopic updating and deconstruction of the "Carmen" story, it's "Carmen", it's "Last Tango in Paris", it's a girl and a gun, it's the Keystone Kops, it gives us Godard as randy old pervert and it's informed throughout by Beethoven's beautiful late string quartets, which this film made me start listening to. It's also screamingly funny.

I will admit to understanding about a tenth of this and Godard's later work is so personal that it's probably futile to hope that everything will become clear, but I shall see this again as soon as I get the chance. Hal Hartley (and Tarantino) eat your heart out....

Prenom Carmen is possibly the most accessible Godard I've seen in my quest so far. What this means, is that at least partially the traditional devices of cinema, story, characters, a turn of events, are accepted or tolerated at some face value. Characters are allowed to behave like they're in a movie without having to look back at the camera to note its presence. He puts something on the table for others, for the casual watcher, as though coming out of a decade of isolation he yearns for some company, for a theater where he's not sitting alone with his thoughts on the screen.

This desire to be open does not mean, of course, that Godard forsakes his idiosynchracy, the habitual criticizing. He plays himself in the film, the half-mad middle aged crank director chomping on his cigar like a Sam Fuller, at some point he says that "Mao was the best chef, he fed all of China", but that's almost a bad joke or an afterthought (bitterly ironic considering the hundreds of thousands Mao starved to death in that effort to feed them), and I get the impression from Prenom Carmen of an attempt to ruminate on the transience of life and time, the beauty of nature. These moments of quiet beauty, the shots of waves crashing on a beach, an evening sky with an early moon, night trains passing each other on the rails, show the desire of the director to reflect at a kind of peace.

The commitment is not total though, because Godard still clings to outside conditions, he still feels the need to comment politically, but that's only when he himself comes on screen. What used to be an object of serious consideration though, is now relegated to a quirk, to a caricaturist's signature. As such, I read it as a sign of disillusionment, like Godard partly views himself as the crony pariah of cinema he portrays in the film, pushed to the side, babbling and ranting to himself.

The film about a film device is put to rather average use, it's an opportunity to set up a heist plot then pushed to the side again. What intrigues me a lot here is the overlapping timeline. As the bank heist erupts in gunshots, the film cuts to a string quartet rehearsing Mozart, they stop and one of the players asks the girl to play with more violence. Later we see the same girl peering up close to the tablature to see is there something to be deciphered in the notes, doing that she mutters to herself a question about the clouds and "will they part to reveal torrents of life".

A central tenet in the film is something about the innocent and the guilty and how they're on opposite corners, but the suggestion on injustice is only vague, a sketch without backbone. Other quotations are banal or obvious, but the difference for me from his New Wave days, is that irreverence is no longer an aspiration. It's a source of humor, but there's an effort to reach out for the poetic. Godard playing himself in the film says at some point that we need to close our eyes, not open them, but I believe he's beginning here to open himself up to something more than interpreting or criticizing, to the possibility of seeing the world. From my little investigation, I'm looking forward to see if he carried that over to films like Nouvelle Vague and Helas pour Moi.