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Between Une femme est une femme and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, the bouncy cupcake in amnesiac suburbia. She (Macha Méril) ping-pongs from pilot hubby (Philippe Leroy) to thespian lover (Bernard Noël), cubist editing abstracts the illicit fling into limbs, shoulders and torsos in the creased void of a mattress. Half-clad Fantômas on the rooftop, the Eiffel Tower from the slouched vantage point of a moving car. At home the traveler ponders the restless fashion-plate: "Where do you begin? Where does my image of you begin?" Leroy broods over Auschwitz but Méril prefers a Cocteauesque present tense, a sense of memory cannot quite compete with measurements for the perfect bust. "In French, all great ideas are feminine." "Funny how men never want women to do what they do." Just as in Alphaville as he would envision the future simply by checking into a hotel, all Jean-Luc Godard has to do here to expose a culture of commodified inundation is to leaf through a fashion magazine. Molière's "reflections of comedy," an Apollinaire poem read by Roger Leenhardt, Rossellini's Holocaust anecdote. The modern couple in pajamas, a novelty record and a panning camera in a 4-minute tour de force of dawning alienation. "Toujours le rêve et la réalité," the antiseptic pensée versus Madame Céline's (Rita Maiden) zesty recollection of coarse sex. Eavesdropping on the girls, flipping the swimming pool negative, doting on brassiere billboards. A penetrating dance of misogyny and feminism, and a chronicle of busy afternoons of people jumping in and out of taxis and zipping from store to store. Shout-out to Demy's slow-mo, Nuit et brouillard at the little Orly theater, "le cinéma est un mystère." Hands clasped together at the onset drift apart at the close, cf. Lang's The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |