DVD and Film Mini-Reviews #93
Alphaville (Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
****1/2
There's an eerie, unsettling disjointedness to how Godard tells a tale. And it's to Godard's supreme credit that he's able to tell his stories in this manner, yet still able to make them compelling, intriguing, riveting. Even when you're wondering what the hell is going on, you're interested enough not to shut down, you simply try harder to figure out what Godard is doing. I can't think of any other director who is (or was) able to do this with the consistency that Godard did, especially during his heyday in the 60s. You have Breathless, Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, Contempt, Band of Outsiders, and Masculin feminin. All films highly regarded from that great Nouvelle Vague period of French cinema, yet all very different from any of the other greats from the same period. Alphaville might be the strangest of them all (though Pierrot le fou might argue the point). This is a science fiction film with very few visual science fiction trappings. It's about ideas. Dystopia. Lemmy Caution, an investigator, of the Raymond Chandler school of investigation, travels to the Alphaville with three specific missions, locate a missing agent who precursed Lemmy to Alphaville, kills Professor Von Braun, the creator of Alphaville, and disable the computer that controls Alphaville, the Alpha 60. Very film noirish in cinematics and dialog. All of Godard's usual messages are here undisguised, the fight against complacency in a population, anti-consumerism, love.

Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
****
I'm still trying to figure out this film, baffling to be sure, yet I still loved it. A lot of the reviews I've been reading try to focus on the plot, yet as I watched Pierrot le fou the plot seemed entirely secondary to the film as a whole. I'm beginning to think the film is really about experiences, experiences wrapped around whims. The biggest whim is the plot, mostly because Godard only wrote the day's shooting script the morning before the actual shoot. Coupled with the screenplay unfolding backwards through time, the shooting began in Nice and finished in Paris, so in essence Godard was writing his story from finish to start, and then edited it start to finish. Obviously it was the idea that was most important to Godard, as the state of the plot will attest. The plot mostly strings together, but it's more a series of vignettes tied to an overall road movie theme than an arc from start to finish (or finish to start, as the case may be). So the film is about experiences, creating experiences, for the characters and the audience. As Godard once said about Pierrot, "it is not really a film, it's an attempt at cinema." It encompasses everything ever put to film, thematically, it's a musical, it has dance numbers, it has comedy of the more intellectual variety and comedy of the Laurel and Hardy variety, it has action, car chases and gunplay, murder and intrigue and mystery, and romance. The film makes small statements on our consumer culture, on the state of cinema, on love. Pierrot le fou is everything at once, and yet it can feel like it was nothing. It's strange wonderful conundrum.

The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)
****
The opening shot is of Bill Murray racing to catch his train, somewhere in India, running along the platform, reaching for a railing that is ultimately moving a little faster than he can. Adrian Brody runs by, hops on the train. Bill is left on the platform. Since Rushmore, Bill Murray has been a mainstay of Wes Anderson films. This opening is perfect, for a film that does not feature Bill Murray at all. Hell, perhaps Bill has decided to move in a different direction artistically, and this is his Wes Anderson swan song, his farewell (only time will tell, but it would make for a perfect send off). But this is only the movie's opening (it matters nothing to the rest of the film), and it was perfect. The remainder of the film? Well, it's Wes Anderson, though at a much smaller scale. You'd think a road movie through India would be large and grand, but no. This is intimate, smaller than Rushmore even (a film that opened up its limited environs through the stage productions of its main character). Even though Darjeeling traverses some grand environs, and has shots worthy of any Merchant Ivory film, Anderson negates largess through cramped train sets and screen-filling closeups. Though he doesn't let us forget we're in India, like any Wes Anderson film, this is a film about characters who have lost their way, trying to rediscover the path they've strayed from. In this case, three brothers reconnecting for the first time, a year after their father's accidental death, trying to locate their mother, who has vanished to a remote catholic monastery in northern India. Wes isn't reaching for new ground here, if you enjoyed Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, you'll enjoy The Darjeeling Limited.