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La putain sacrée and how to photograph her, a twelve-part treatment. Start from the back and work inwards, says Jean-Luc Godard, Nana at the bistro counter is a Magritte obfuscation until a reflection in the background mirror reveals Anna Karina's pensive visage. "Take away the outside and the inside is left, take away the inside and you see the soul," a child's reworking of Montaigne. The aspiring starlet and her crises, breaking up with her husband and dodging her concierge and working at the record store. Jukeboxes and pinball machines are recurring Parisian pillars, gunfire in the streets literally shoots frames out of the film. "Escape is a pipe dream," so it goes with Godard's Cabiria, she strolls down the boulevard and allows herself to be picked up and suddenly she's being rented out to lout after lout, gripped by the pimp's (Sady Rebbot) avalanche of statistics. Modernist identity and its various transactions, severe and incandescent. In the labyrinth of motel doors, the courtesan savors a cigarette between clients; at the pool hall, she defiantly shimmies and bops before an indifferent beau (Peter Kassovitz) in one of cinema's greatest musical sequences. Smudging the lines between onscreen performance and documentary essence, Karina drifts from yearning shopgirl to doomed muse in Poe's "The Oval Portrait," only to end crumpled on the pavement. ("This is our story," goes the recognizably raspy murmur on the soundtrack.) La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc at the Cinémathèque, Falconetti judged by men and drained by cameras, the heroine can relate. Porthos' death by thought, an Ophülsian position ("le bonheur n'est pas gai"), the poet's distrust of language. Godard carries on the investigation (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Every Man for Himself), but never again with such emotional nakedness. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. With André S. Labarthe, Guylaine Schlumberger, and Brice Parain. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |