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"Adrift in the cosmos" and "found in a dump," a reconfiguration of Hitchcock's The Birds in the key of Les Carabiniers. From Paris to Oinville with a squabbling couple (Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne), before that the wife semi-silhouetted in her undies recounts an erotic escapade as a deadpan nod to Persona. (Bergman returns the compliment in Shame.) Metal and viscera pave the road, the celebrated lateral sprawl across a traffic jam plays like evil Tati, the black convertible speeds past the punchline of mangled corpses and bloody puddles. "When did civilization begin?" Jean-Luc Godard posits when it ends, in tandem with the cinema in a short-circuiting Möbius strip of capitalists and cannibals. The hilarity of Juliet Berto's tirade following the collision of red Triumph and tractor is not lost on an observer of "les luttes des classes," trying not to laugh while posing with other onlookers before advertising placards. Historical ghosts and literary characters float by, declamatory Saint-Just (Jean-Pierre Léaud) bridges revolutions old and new ("Liberté est violence"), hitchhiking Joseph Balsamo (Daniel Pommereulle) turns graveyard of cars into flock of sheep with a Méliès cut. No reaction for immolated Emily Brontë (Blandine Jeanson) but a blood-curdling scream for a charred Hermès handbag, a barnyard sonata with a rotating camera laments Mozart not living to reap his loyalties. "What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people!" Mobile long-shot gives way to static close-up for a bit of lunchtime excruciation, African and Arab truckers (Omar Diop, László Szabó) taking turns chewing sandwiches and pontificating about Third World upheavals. Flesh-eating guerrillas lounge in Henri Rousseau verdure and deal in Chaïm Soutine carcasses, their butcher stands over a corpse and raises an oversized carver to daintily crack an egg. "The horrors of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome with more horror," Godard roasts the entrails and gazes into the future, the missus asks for seconds. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. With Yves Afonso, Paul Gégauff, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Jean Eustache, Valérie Lagrange, Jean-Claude Guilbert, and Anne Wiazemsky.
--- Fernando F. Croce |