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The Concorde Saint-Lazare, a first-class hotel in a second-class city, just the opaque backdrop for a welter of fixed bouts and pratfalling sleuths. (The view of the outside world is revealed as a recorded image and promptly freeze-framed.) Death of the Prince, detective Prospero (Laurent Terzieff) and nephew (Jean-Pierre Léaud) on the case two years already, "history is constantly stammering." Another room, another drama: Tiger Jones the boxer (Stéphane Ferrara) munches on giant Toblerone bars and practices his jab on the bosom of the Princess of the Bahamas (Emmanuelle Seigner), his manager (Johnny Hallyday) is the third side of a triangle involving a married couple (Nathalie Baye, Claude Brasseur). An elegantly decrepit gangland don (Alain Cuny) wanders through it all. "We're not in one of those little French films where the actors believe talking is thinking." A rich comedy about the age of video, composed by Jean-Luc Godard along the lines of De Palma's Body Double—film is an endangered species, theaters are lined with pornography and ghosts of cinema past (Cocteau, Stroheim) turn up on TV screens. Rilke's chandeliers (The Sonnets to Orpheus), corridors, staircases and elevators, a small camera on the balcony. "Oh, the breasts of young women." "Oh, the money of men." The cosmos-in-a-coffee-cup gag from 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle is here transposed to a billiards table, Alphaville's computer has discovered pixel art. Eric Fischl arrangements, Schubert plus Wagner plus Chopin on the soundtrack, "classique, s'il vous plait!" Lang's Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse, Seiter's Room Service. Catastrophe is the first verse of a love poem, says Godard, a shootout and eternal romance mark the end. Dedicated to Cassavetes and Eastwood and Ulmer, fellow searchers one and all. With Aurelle Doazan, Xavier Saint-Macary, and Julie Delpy.
--- Fernando F. Croce |