William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth (theatre director Peter Sellars) struggles to piece together fragments of
his illustrious great-great-granddaddy's works while bumping into wizened Mafia capo Don Learo (Burgess
Meredith) and his princess daughter Cordelia (Molly Ringwald), each undergoing their own emotional/spiritual
crisis. Whatever else it may be -- a grim in-joke, a passive-aggressive semiotics essay, the director's unofficial
Hollywood debut -- Jean-Luc Godard's riff on the Bard is above all peerless mockery of commercial high-concept movie-dealing. Working from a napkin-etched contract boasting a screenplay/performance by
Norman Mailer that never materialized (though Mailer and daughter Kate pop up in the two takes that did get shot),
Godard goes for disembodied pontificating, a post-Chernobyl world evoked via resort dining rooms and porches,
and some dreadful slapstick involving one slurring, growling, farting Prof. Pluggy (Jean-Luc decked in patch cords
for dreadlocks). Flaws and all (gallivanting in the woods, unfunny mouth-twisting, a what-the-fuck Woody Allen cameo),
the film ("a picture shot in the back") straddles beauty and dissonance as only a genuinely radical artist can: Pluggy
is Godard's Lear, Fool and dying Renaissance painter, just as Cordelia's demise evokes the death of Eve Democracy at the end of Sympathy for the Devil. Like much of Godard's autumnal phase, it is a lament for
vanishing art in a degraded universe -- against this degradation he has only his own ability to craft works of art, and
his incantatory struggles to channel the old masters (Bresson and Velazquez, Welles and Goya) mirror the young
Shakespeare's attempts to keep his ancestor's greatness alive. Not nearly as successful as Nouvelle Vague or In
Praise of Love, but essential later Godard. Also with Julie Delpy, Leos Carax, and Michèle Pétin.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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