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The dedicatees are Ray and Fuller, "qui m'ont élevé dans le respect de l'image et du son." The heroine awakens at the onset but the oneiric effect goes on, private dick as glazed mannequin, Anna Karina in her Mondrian dress. A sawed-off informer invites himself into her hotel room and lifts his fedora to nervously pat his hair whenever she clicks her revolver at him, just the kind of gag called for in a thoroughgoing derangement of The Big Sleep. "I feel like I'm caught up in a Walt Disney movie, but with Humphrey Bogart, so it's a political movie." Atlantic-Cité, painted like Demy's Cherbourg, stage for "a murky case." The bandaged fugitive from Dark Passage is cut down to the bone, and there's David Goodis (Yves Afonso) pecking at his typewriter while the girlfriend named Mizoguchi strums her guitar in the bathroom. The screen is a comic-book panel, an advertisement billboard, a shooting gallery on the word "liberté": A farewell to the Muse as Jean-Luc Godard filibusters on a tape recorder. "In what second-rate tragedy have you once again cast me in the final role?" Preminger Street this and Inspector Aldrich that, a warehouse of movie cutouts for the simulacrum of modern existence. Lateral scan of the gym, circular view of the garage, semiotics with the barman. The drifting shamus is tipped off by a hobbling worker (cf. Lang's The Big Heat) and bumps into gunsels named McNamara and Nixon, the end of the line is a ride with Philippe Labro. Whooshing airplanes and Schumann slivers, László Szabó's Daffy Duck impression and Jean-Pierre Léaud's pirouette of death. "O mise en scène, mise en scène, o mise en scène." The road at the close sees another new beginning for Godard, leaving behind "As Tears Go By" and gazing ahead to "Sympathy for the Devil." With Marianne Faithfull, Marc Dudicourt, Ernest Menzer, Jean-Claude Bouillon, and Kyoko Kosaka.
--- Fernando F. Croce |