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The Little Soldier (1963)

André Crous

Tackling the immorality of war but doing so from a stable, sterile perch, The Little Soldier points the finger of blame at all sides in France’s War on Algeria.

The Little SoldierFrance
3.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Le petit soldat

Made in 1960 but banned until 1963 because of its content, The Little Soldier was Jean-Luc Godard’s first political film. It followed hot on the heels of his wild and massively entertaining début, Breathless, which had made him famous. This, his second film, turned out to be so controversial in his native France that he would release two other films – A Woman is a Woman (1961) and My Life to Live (1962) – before the censors finally permitted it to see the light of day. The reason for the controversy was the film’s tackling of the War in Algeria and, specifically, its depiction of torture scenes involving Algerian fighters who use the French army’s methods of torture on a white French citizen.

And yet, the film is more about the protagonist’s lack of conviction than anything else. Ironically, much of the action is the result of inaction. The main character is Bruno Forestier, a young reporter for the French News Agency who is based in Geneva. At least, that is how we are first introduced to him. It is May 1958, the height of the conflict in Algeria, and he tells us in voice-over that “the time for action is over… the time for reflection has begun.” That does not sound like the start of a very dramatic story, and it won’t be, as the film will have its fair share of self-important “reflection” replete with literary quotations grabbed out of thin air.

Literature is everywhere, and, with one major exception, these references are pure Godardian onanism.  The most ludicrous reference comes early in the story onboard a train ride, when Bruno’s thoughts turn to a story by La Fontaine entitled “The Acorn and the Pumpkin”. The French title, “Le gland et la citrouille”, is repeated over and over on the soundtrack, and slowly the focus shifts only to the first part, “Le gland”. A few moments later, we see the train pass the station of “Gland”, even as a voice on the soundtrack drones on by repeating this word.

The action proper, which will culminate with such drama in the last third of the film, starts out very slowly and rather aimlessly. Bruno is involved in French intelligence-gathering operations and has been tasked with assassinating a pro-Algerian radio host in Geneva. But Bruno is not really interested in following orders – not because he feels particularly strongly one way or the other but because he doesn’t have a dog in the fight. In his opinion, you’ll get scolded for not doing something, so it’s preferable to do it even if you don’t want to. But this speaks of stunningly weak character. Bruno has no real opinions and even less passion. His passivity alone, while certainly representative of many young French men at the time, almost sinks the entire film.

Luckily for him, he meets a Danish-born Russian girl named Veronika and can’t stop thinking about her. Here, the film industry makes the first of many obtrusive appearances. Godard pays tribute to the famous Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer by giving Veronika his surname. Later, while taking photos of her, Bruno expresses one of Godard’s most famous phrases of all time: “Photography is truth, and the cinema is the truth 24 times per second.” This saying may have some validity in certain contexts, but so many of Godard’s films would seem to remind us how artificial, constructed most films are, although the truth (of the diegesis? of the world outside the film?) can certainly be a malleable concept.

Unlike Breathless, where the focus was firmly on the romance between the two main characters, A Little Soldier has little to say about the relationship between Bruno and Veronika. However, it is clear that Bruno is besotted with her, and so is the camera. Although he doesn’t look it (the film is very stingy with its emotions), Bruno is in high spirits. “I wondered if I was happy to feel free or free to feel happy”, an improvement over Patricia in Breathless, who had a more melancholy demeanour (“I don’t know if I’m not happy because I’m not free. Or not free because I’m not happy.”)

As an aside, Godard and Karina got married the next year. Following her début here, she would go on to star in another six of his films.

The Little Soldier takes an inordinate amount of time to reel us in, but around the one-hour mark, we finally reach the most dramatic portion of the narrative. And it’s a doozy. After refusing to reveal the telephone number of a close associate, Bruno is kidnapped by members of Algeria’s pro-independence FLN, who handcuff him in a bathtub and gradually escalate the torture. First, it is psychological (they show him a photo of an acquaintance who had his throat slashed), and then it is very physical: They burn him with matches and hold him underwater before wrapping his head in a sheet and waterboarding him with a handheld showerhead.

But this is Godard, so nothing seems straightforward. When he is burnt, there is a cut to a woman in the next room who is reading Mao Zedong and Lenin so that the chairman’s big thoughts (“One spark can set an entire plain ablaze”) are put in relation to the events we witness. But before we can blame the communists for such inhumane punishment, we see the Arabs are reading Henri Alleg’s La Question, which had caused a scandal when it laid out in detail how the French tortured the Algerians. This was clearly the reason the French censors banned the film until after Algeria had gained independence. With both the far right and the far left implicated in war crimes here, seemingly no one leaves unscathed.

Despite this torture, which also involves live current, Bruno doesn’t crack. “I’m not opposed to telling you, but I don’t feel like it, so I won’t”, he tells them. But while some may find his commitment to apathy admirable, Veronika makes an astute (and prescient) observation. She tells him that France will ultimately lose its battle with the Algerians because it lacks the latter’s strong ideal (namely, having an independent nation).

The film’s slow pace, its protagonist’s inscrutability and the alienation induced by the steadfast lack of emotions all make for a frustrating viewing experience. A protracted dialogue towards the end is an absolute mess of topics and sounds like a checklist by the screenwriter-director instead of an organic dialogue to bring the film to a satisfying close. Although eminently watchable, it is a far cry from Godard’s début film and hints at problems to come in his later political works.

Breathless (1960)

André Crous

Sixty years after its release and after inspiring generations of aspring directors, Breathless continues to dazzle with its gentle undermining of conventions and wonderful central performances.

BreathlessFrance
5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: À bout de souffle

Jean, Jean-Paul and Jean-Luc comprised the coolest trio of 1960, and their lively shenanigans demolished post-war French cinema in one fell swoop. But we shouldn’t discount the influence of another Jean – documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch – whose cinematic grammar ended up marking a turning point in the global motion picture industry. 

Above all, Breathless is remembered for introducing the world to the jump cut. By cutting out the silence in a scene of dialogue, or pretending like one steady stream of dialogue is happening even as we can see the setting change, Jean-Luc Godard infused his début feature with a dynamism that was revolutionary. Rouch had used the jump cut a few months earlier during a long dialogue scene in I, a Negro (Moi, un noir), but it was Godard who used it to unforgettable effect.

Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo star as Patricia and Michel, a young couple still trying to figure out how they feel about each other after three weeks together. The former is an American journalist who walks up and down the Champs-Elysées selling the New York Herald Tribune; the latter is a young Frenchman involved in a vague criminal enterprise – when we meet him in the opening scene, he has just stolen a car in Marseille. Later, on his way to Paris, he kills a policeman on the highway. The film is dedicated to Monogram Pictures, a Hollywood film studio that had gone under a few years earlier but used to produce very low-budget films, including several with detective Charlie Chan (always played by a white actor in yellowface).

But while the romance is front and centre, thanks in large part to a stunningly choreographed 20-minute scene in a hotel bedroom, all the talk is about the film’s subtle undermining of conventions. Its anti-establishment gimmicks, including the jump cuts and the breaking of the fourth wall, are all very subtle but set the film apart from anything else while fully maintaining its accessibility. Some scenes are dynamic while fully realised in an unbroken take; others maintain their verbal coherence despite multiple cuts. Amazingly for a Godard film, Breathless even contains a few pretty helicopter shots of the sights in Paris.

Michel, who uses the pseudonym László Kovács (one of many cinematic references: Belmondo had played a character by this name the year before in Claude Chabrol’s suspense production, Web of Passion), spends the whole film trying to evade capture by the police. In an early scene, he walks past a poster for Robert Aldrich’s Ten Seconds to Hell, which urges the reader to “Live dangerously to the very end”. Moments later, a young girl hawking copies of the Cahiers du cinéma (specifically, the July 1959 issue with a still from Hiroshima mon amour on the cover) asks him whether he has anything against the youth, to which he replies that he likes the older ones, presumably also referring to movies.

But the girl he is interested in is Seberg’s Patricia, who is beautiful and has a confidence that belies her age – both the actress and her character were only 20 at the time. Her American accent may be appalling (among other cringeworthy inflections, she keeps pronouncing Paris as “Perree”), but he is so smitten with her, he only corrects her once. She also yearns for a “Romeo and Juliet” relationship, blissfully unaware of how the play ends.

Michel, presumably a vessel for Godard who grew up in Switzerland, sometimes pronounces numbers in the Swiss way and gushes about the beauty of girls all along Lake Geneva. Despite his chain smoking, despite the annoying affectation he has of stroking his lips with his finger and despite his criminality, we are drawn to him because in times of crisis he is cool as a cucumber. And after he spends 20 minutes in Patricia’s bed, most of it shirtless, it’s difficult to find him anything except irresistible.

Setting nearly a quarter of one’s story in the bedroom is a bold but very risky move. The number of possible shots seems limited, and without any major action, the viewer could easily get bored or frustrated. Two years earlier, in his short film Charlotte and Her Boyfriend, Godard had put Belmondo in a shoebox-sized studio apartment and let his character vent for 10 minutes at a mostly silent ex-girlfriend. The result was tedious in form and substance, and it was only half the length of the bedroom scene in Breathless. But here the director finds multiple points of interest to keep us enthralled, seemingly with the greatest of ease.

It is worth noting that, despite its air of improvisation and free-spirited nature, the film clearly had a screenplay. For example, the word “dégueulasse”, which is so critical to boosting the ambiguity of the final scene, appears here and there throughout the film. In that final scene, Godard brilliantly captures the confusion of the moment by having Belmondo pronounce a mixture of “tu es dégueulasse” (you’re disgusting) and “c’est dégueulasse” (this is terrible). There are no clear answers, and our efforts to understand what is happening neatly dovetail with Patricia’s own bewilderment (“What is ‘dégueulasse’?”).

What makes Breathless so appealing to so many people is that it simultaneously makes us think we can make a film like that and is almost transcendental in its coolness. It openly cops to being a film, and to being a film influenced by other films. But the combination of energy and introspection, of long takes and jump cuts and of shooting on the street while being very well thought out (see a stunningly framed shot taken from a taxi here) makes for an unforgettably visceral experience. Having the spectre of death hang over such lively proceedings only adds to the film’s enigma. It is no surprise that Patricia looks directly at us when a writer she interviews (played by French director-producer Jean-Pierre Melville) tells her about his greatest ambition: “To become immortal, and then, die.” 

Allegedly miffed at the film’s global success, Godard would never again make anything else that comes even close to being this thrilling.

Charlotte and Her Boyfriend (1958)

André Crous

A trial run for one of the most famous scenes in Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s Charlotte and Her Boyfriend puts two people in a room but only lets one of them speak (non-stop) for 10 full minutes.

Charlotte et son JulesFrance
3*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Michel Latouche

Running time: 13 minutes

Original title: Charlotte et son Jules

After the previous year’s lovely All the Boys Are Called Patrick, which Eric Rohmer, one of his colleagues at the Cahiers du cinéma, had written, Jean-Luc Godard tried his own hand at writing a short film. The product had a much more narrow focus but clearly never went through many drafts. Charlotte and Her Boyfriend is a stream-of-consciousness rant for a full 10 minutes in a confined space, and it loses steam very quickly.

It reunited Godard with Patrick‘s Anne Collette (whose character in that short had the same name) and features Jean-Paul Belmondo in one of his very first roles. Unfortunately for the director, Belmondo was called up to serve in the French army in Algeria shortly after the shoot. As a result, Godard filled in for him during post-production, so every time Belmondo speaks, it is Godard’s own voice, immediately recognisable by his higher pitch and slight lisp. It doesn’t fit Belmondo at all, although it does make the character sound fairly pathetic.

Collette plays the titular Charlotte, an aspiring actress who arrives at the apartment of her ex-boyfriend, a writer named Jules. It quickly becomes clear that she had left him, and he is still seething with rage. Serious about giving her a piece of his mind but unable to control his rage, he lashes out in a torrent of half-formed ideas that become more and more ridiculous as he spins out of control. All the while, she smiles, remains perfectly silent and is unaffected by this mood swings. It takes a very long 10 minutes, but ultimately, it is very satisfying to learn exactly why she decided to visit him.

While Jules moves passionately about his own apartment, marching back and forth with determination, Godard delivers the voice-over mechanically, like a robot half-awake. The film is clearly on Charlotte’s side, however. During the opening credits, the music only plays when the camera is on her, which turns to silence when there is a cut to Jules. Later on, when she tilts her head at him to the right or to the left, the camera tilts along with her. This perspective, as well as Jules’s non-stop, gradually less lucid verbal diarrhoea (he wants her to come back to him, but he keeps calling her an idiot), has a devastating effect on our perception of him.

The message almost seems to be that love drives one crazy. The film’s style emphasises this slight disconnect from reality, as we mostly see Charlotte and Jules visually separated by one-shots. This, in addition to Jules’s voice clearly coming from a voice-over that does not belong to the body we see on-screen, produces an odd discontinuity between sight and sound that is wholly appropriate to the story.

And yet, while Charlotte’s happy-go-lucky attitude offers a fresh contrast to Jules’s self-involved but utterly tedious diatribe, the film is mostly a bore and feels much longer than its brief running time. The setup obviously anticipates one of the best scenes in Breathless, in which Belmondo and Jean Seberg spend 20 minutes talking in a small apartment. But whereas Charlotte and Her Boyfriend is basically a monologue, delivered with a dubbed voice that lacks emotion, Breathless features two palpably living and breathing characters interacting with each other like real people. Charlotte and Jules, by contrast, very much remain rather shallow creatures of fiction.

The Carabineers (1963)

André Crous

The Carabineers has a thought or two about wars and the people who fight them but is mostly just an excuse for Jean-Luc Godard to separate image and sound from each other.

Les carabiniersFrance
3.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriters:
Jean Gruault
Roberto Rossellini
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 85 minutes

Original title: Les carabiniers

There are moments in Jean-Luc Godard’s The Carabineers when it seems the director is about to say something of real importance about the immorality of warfare or the pointlessness of killing one’s fellow men and women. But no. Nine times out of ten, he would rather engage in experimental (mostly audio, sometimes visual) gimmicks. As a result, the film ends up being about as ineffectual as its dimwitted central characters.

The opening screen may be the most important of the entire enterprise. Quoting Jorge Luis Borges in a 1963 interview with Madeleine Chapsal from L’Express, a handwritten title card informs us that “More and more, I’m striving for simplicity. I use worn metaphors. Basically, that’s what is eternal. For example, stars resemble eyes, or death is like sleep.” Given the eccentric behaviour of its characters and the minimalist sets they inhabit, Godard’s film can’t be considered even remotely realistic. This quotation seems the best possible key to understanding the film as a kind of macabre caricature of reality, closer to theatre than cinema.

For one thing, the main characters are two brothers inexplicably called Ulysses and Michelangelo. One of them is married to a vampy but rather dishevelled woman named Cleopatra, the other to a Venus. No one resembles their literary or historical namesake in the slightest. It is possible Godard simply attributed high and mighty names to these floundering fools as a way of extending the film’s attitude toward war in general – an activity that, after all, is often described in undeservedly glowing terms.

Godard, whose The Little Soldier (Le petit soldat) – made in 1961 but not released until 1963 – already showcased the director’s ambivalent (to say the least) relationship to war, disabuses the viewer very quickly of any notion that warfare is heroic. In the opening scene, riflemen arrive at a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere (the surroundings are more barren than the moonscape) to deliver a letter from the king to draft Ulysses and Michelangelo into the army. Importantly, we are never told what country or which ideals they are fighting to protect, nor who the enemy is. But one of the carabineers (riflemen) tells the young men they may do whatever they want because “in war, anything goes”. And this is where Godard lands his most direct blow:

Michelangelo: I got a question.
Carabineer: Go ahead.
M.: In the war, can we take slot machines?
C.: Yes.
M.: No charges if we take old men’s eyeglasses? Can we break a kid’s arm? Both arms? Stab a guy in the back? Rob apartments? Burn towns? Burn women?
C.: Yes.
M.: And steal classy trousers?
C.: Yes.
M.: If we want, we can massacre innocent folks?
C.: Yes.
M.: Denounce folks, too?
C.: Yes.
M.: Eat in restaurants without paying?
C.: Yes, yes. That’s war.

As usual with Godard, the point could have been made much more succinctly, but it still lands. And soon, egged on by Cleopatra and Venus who see dollar signs where others see violence and bloodshed, the two men are off to war. What follows are snippets of life on the front. One of the biggest action scenes involves a lone tank driving around an ashen countryside with fewer than 10 riflemen in tow. We hear a lot of gunfire but see almost nothing. From time to time, a bomb explodes in the fields, but no one is injured. The representation is clearly theatrical and not meant to be taken as a realistic depiction.

Unfortunately, Godard’s distinct brand of alienation continuously prevents us from becoming emotionally involved. Everyone is shot offscreen or shown getting killed very far away. Onscreen excerpts from the soldiers’ letters back home speak of incredible violence (“We rip women’s rings from their fingers and make people undress before shooting them, naked, next to an anti-tank trap”), but we never witness any of this. Perhaps the men are lying, or perhaps Godard is too busy reinventing the war film to realise a fully functional machine (a story told on film) is more interesting than seeing it disassembled, rearranged and barely operational.

Not only is the violence made banal by being presented in its separate audio and visual components, but there is not a single recognisable human soul we can empathise with. Confronted with loud shots of gunfire but rarely seeing guns being fired or people getting killed, we feel nothing. The presentation of a near-rape is so matter-of-fact it is almost comical, and Godard’s willingness to steer us in this direction is monstrous.

Moreover, the film does not contain a shred of everyday humanity. When the men return home at the end of their tour, they are emotionless. Cleopatra and Venus, who have been cheating on them, show no emotion either. For nearly 10 minutes, they throw some postcards around, which appear as stand-ins for the real things, but what exactly Godard is trying to say about this blurry distinction between life and representation is unclear. Earlier in the film, Michelangelo had saluted a Rembrandt self-portrait, and Ulysses was mesmerised by Barnaba da Modena’s painting of “Madonna and Child”, but everything feels terribly ad hoc, not part of a larger, well-developed message.

After an extensive mish-mash of scenes from the “battlefield”, the story comes to an abrupt conclusion, closely following in the footsteps of Godard’s previous feature, My Life to Live. In this respect, the film does tie itself tightly to the fate of its characters: When it ends, their story ends; and thus, they must end, as well. While far from unappealing, The Carabineers lacks characters for us to become attached to, and ultimately, this mostly feels like just another contrarian exercise for the director to amuse himself with.

All the Boys Are Called Patrick (1957)

André Crous

The Rohmer-scripted All the Boys Are Called Patrick is among the most straightforward, playful films of Godard’s oeuvre, although the number of references to the world of film already start to pile up. 

All the Boys Are Called PatrickFrance
4*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Eric Rohmer
Director of Photography:
Michel Latouche

Running time: 20 minutes

Original title: Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick
Alternate title: Véronique et Charlotte, ou Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick

With two rather conventional début films – a documentary (about the construction of a dam in southern Switzerland) and a genuinely delightful short (about a woman deciding to spice up her life by engaging in some prostitution) – under his belt, Jean-Luc Godard embarked on his next project in the autumn of 1957. Shot on 35 mm, the result was All the Boys Are Called Patrick, 20 minutes in length and based on a screenplay by that great fanatic of dialogue, Eric Rohmer. Although unexpectedly cute for a Godard production, it clearly anticipated the budding director’s future (pre)occupation with films and form.

The titular Patrick is actually just one playboy who chats up and arranges to hook up with every girl he meets. What makes this story so interesting is that the two girls he happens to cross minutes apart one afternoon are roommates, and it is a shrewd idea to give them different perspectives on being flirted with. However, while the central narrative idea is wonderful, everything that Godard was responsible for (most notably, the multiple references to art and other films) makes this immediately recognisable as the work of a young film enthusiast rather than a director.

Véronique (Nicole Berger) and Charlotte (Anne Collette) are two young women sharing a flat in Paris’s Montparnasse district. Véronique has a lunchtime appointment but tells Charlotte they can meet up at the Luxembourg Gardens between 2 and 3 o’clock. Charlotte, who reads Hegel in the morning and flips through some pulp fiction (The Fate of the Immodest Blonde, which Godard probably chose because it was written by Patrick Quentin) over lunch, is immediately hit upon when she arrives in the public park.

The chatty flirt is called Patrick (played by Jean-Claude Brialy), who is clearly as shallow as a puddle but spouts off multiple references to the world of film in an attempt to impress her. Pretending to speak Japanese, for example, he merely drops the names of two of the era’s foremost directors from the Land of the Rising Sun: “Mizoguchi-Kurosawa?” It would not be a leap to equate the character with Godard himself, although Brialy is infinitely better-looking.

Charlotte eventually acquiesces to having a quick coffee with him. At the café, the two share a table next to a man whose face is buried in a copy of Arts, whose cover provocatively proclaims that “French cinema is dying under false legends”. This article by François Truffaut appeared in May of that year. Patrick persists with the falsehoods as he claims to be studying law, although the film slyly reveals that he has a geometry textbook. Despite herself, Charlotte ultimately arranges a date with him the following evening.

Moments after parting, Patrick runs into Véronique, who is just returning from the Luxembourg Gardens where Charlotte was nowhere to be found. All but beating her into submission to have a drink, they go to another nearby café, where Patrick runs through more or less the same lines as before (he told Charlotte it has been a month since he has picked up a girl and tells Véronique it has been a year) but somehow scores another date out of this forced meeting. The atmosphere of widespread cinephilia evolves as Véronique is also carrying around a copy of Cahiers du cinéma (it’s the July 1957 edition, with Orson Welles on the cover; later in the film, the magazine’s co-founder, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, also gets a shout-out).

Fortunately, unlike many of the director’s later films, this is the work of someone gingerly experimenting with the medium and not yet trying to steamroll over its conventional form. While the editing is rather thrown together, there is still very much a story to latch onto here, and Rohmer, in particular, deserves our gratitude for keeping the dialogue snappy and spontaneous. 

All the Boys Are Called Patrick lags a bit in the second half, when Godard’s camera starts fixating on unnecessary details like the promotional poster for a Pablo Picasso exhibition (perhaps because Patrick, Pablo and the focal point of “Portrait of Paulo” all share the same first two letters, “Pa-“? I wouldn’t put such inanity past Godard) or a giant movie poster for Rebel Without a Cause that the girls have in their bathroom.

However, the verbal sparring keeps our interest, as the action we witness turns ever more complicated thanks to the way the girls tell each other about their respective Patrick. We know the truth, but it is fascinating to see them hiding and altering details about him to impress or slightly put down the other. One says he looks like Cary Grant, the other like the new American actor, Anthony something (presumably Anthony Perkins). Charlotte says she found Patrick incredibly interesting, and Véronique pretends she hates Coca-Cola, while the real events tell a very different story. There is something Rashomon-like about their interaction, albeit with fewer details and more uncertainty about the direction. 

The lack of firm direction from behind the camera is most evident in the endings of many scenes, which often consist of the characters laughing nonsensically at a non-existent joke. However, the story’s three-part structure is sublime in both its simplicity and efficacy. And despite the constant repetition of Beethoven’s “Rondo a capriccio in G Major” on the soundtrack and the camera’s unplanned (or badly executed) movements, the story loses almost none of its appeal, and the climax immediately gives way to the END intertitle. A perfect conclusion to a thoroughly enjoyable 20 minutes.

A Flirtatious Woman (1955)

André Crous

Devoid of the director’s usual pretentiousness, Jean-Luc Godard’s very first fiction short, A Flirtatious Woman, may just be one of the best films he ever created.

Une femme coquetteFrance
4.5*

Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Jean-Luc Godard

Running time: 9 minutes

Original title: Une femme coquette

Made with just a borrowed 16 mm camera and no money, A Flirtatious Woman was Jean-Luc Godard’s first foray into fiction filmmaking. The 24-year-old had shot a 20-minute documentary, Operation Concrete (Opération béton), the previous year, but intrigued by a Maupassant short story entitled “The Signal”, in which a married woman tries her hand at prostitution, he wrote an adaptation and filmed it without any dialogue on the streets of Geneva.

Except for the use of the voice-over and the primary focus on a female character, this feels nothing like a Godard film, which is precisely why it is so good. Technically, it was directed by “Hans Lucas”, Godard’s chosen pseudonym, which he also used on occasion as a byline for his work in the Cahiers du cinéma. The film is not weighed down by film references or political statements, and there are no silly attempts to re-invent film grammar. The French New Wave’s fascination with Hitchcock and with Bernanos via Bresson subtly infuses the narrative without ever overtaking it, and what we get is a thoroughly enjoyable, tightly focused, well-executed film with a central character who justifies her actions intelligently and with a human voice. This cannot be said of the bulk of Godard’s subsequent films. although the film does anticipate Godard’s fixation on prostitution.

In the first and last scenes, we see a young woman, Agnès (Maria Lysandre), writing a letter to her friend, Françoise. The letter is a full confession of the adultery she has committed, which we see in the flashback constituting the main body of the film. The voice-over is very clearly the words written in the letter, but even though this is a verbalisation of written material, the message is conveyed realistically and compellingly. This does not feel like something written down and read for the benefit of the viewer. Many of Godard’s feature films suffer from the burden of being lectures rather than stories. That is certainly not the case here.

Agnès recounts how she was on her way home one day to prepare lunch for her husband when she noticed a woman on a balcony. The woman was well-dressed and gave a warm smile to every man passing on the street below. Young, old, handsome, ugly… she didn’t discriminate. At one point, a serious young chain-smoker with sunglasses (a 25-year-old-going-on-45-year-old Jean-Luc Godard) noticed her, kept looking towards her and noticed she continued to smile at him. He went up, she went inside, and 15 minutes later, he came back out. Agnès is so thrilled by this overt display of flirtatiousness that she innocently dips her toe into the pool of prostitution, too.

On the Île Rousseau, a small island in the middle of Geneva, she approaches a man reading a newspaper on a bench. He peeks at him, again and again. This sustained series of shots culminates in the man being so taken with her coy glances that rushes towards her with a frenzied lust he can no longer control. After all, men are very simple creatures – if anyone good-looking shows the slightest bit of interest in them, they easily turn to putty. Surprised that her ruse was so successful, and also a little shocked by the passion she managed to rouse, Agnès runs back home. But the man pursues her by car, and when he catches up with her, he offers 50 francs (around $250 today) for the pleasure of her company. She doesn’t say no.

A Flirtatious Woman does not contain any dialogue or diegetic sounds. The soundtrack consists exclusively of Agnès’s voice-over reading of the confessional letter, along with bits and pieces of Bach playing continuously throughout. The narration is compelling not only because it comments on the action but also because it informs us about the narrator’s state of mind. Moreover, the words come across as spoken rather than read, which adds dynamism to this part of the soundtrack. The cinematography and the editing both seem a bit flimsy and thrown together from whatever footage Godard managed to collect, but the film’s appeal comes from its simple story told in a compelling way – largely thanks to the voice work, for which I presume the credit goes to actress Maria Lysandre.

Except for the Bach (mostly the “Brandenburg Concertos”) constantly blaring on the soundtrack, this is a wonderful piece of work. It may lack the formal playfulness and the philosophising we tend to associate with Godard, but the film is all the better for it. If only he had kept this up in his later work, though without appearing in them to the same extent as here (this is not merely a Hitchcockian cameo but a major character role), his motion pictures may have been infinitely more relatable.

Knock Knock Knock (2019)

André Crous

Although occasionally unbalanced, the heart-warming, Darjeeling-set Knock Knock Knock mostly sustains our interest thanks to its two leading men.

Knock Knock KnockIndia
3.5*

Director:
Sudhanshu Saria
Screenwriter:
Sudhanshu Saria
Director of Photography:
Achyutanand Dwivedi

Running time: 38 minutes

Lines intersect in director Sudhanshu Saria’s first medium-length film, entitled Knock Knock Knock. But the patterns they form and the nature of their content aren’t always apparent. On the heels of his successful début feature, Loev, Saria has crafted another story focused almost solely on the interactions between two men. This time around, however, the contours are much hazier, and the film may well frustrate viewers looking for clear answers.

Their first meeting happens, seemingly by chance, in the opening scene. Sitting alone at a table on the balcony of a café (Keventer’s, whose breathtaking view was made for the big screen) in Darjeeling, a quiet, focused, middle-aged man (Santilal Mukherjee) is designing a crossword puzzle. We see him misspell the word “camouflage”. Maybe it’s because he is distracted by prying eyes at the next table: They belong to a lively young man, whose clothing is conspicuously similar in colour to his own. His name, at least according to the credits, is Keta (Phuden Sherpa). When he realises he’s been noticed, he comes over to start chatting. He says that he designs tattoos, never wears shoes (according to him, they trap his energy) and is 22 years old.  The older man, whom he affectionately calls “Dada” (father), is not that dissimilar after all: For the last 22 years, he has been coming here from Kolkata on vacation to design crosswords.

The meeting, which also involves some bizarre talk about parabolas, ends the way it began, with Dada looking over his shoulder at Keta. The scene’s perfect bookend structure makes us wonder whether the encounter may have been imagined, and it won’t be the last time.

The next day, Dada is jogging when Keta sneaks up behind him to join his knight-like moves through the rolling hills. But we quickly view him with some suspicion because, despite his proclamation to the contrary the day before, he is now wearing shoes. And yet, he is bubbling with spirit and spontaneity and projects a childlike curiosity that is completely irresistible.

Things start to unravel a bit with an extended dream/nightmare sequence that swings between serenity and sudden scares and leads into the least clearly defined part of the story, which is, unfortunately, also the final act. Regrettably, the plot doesn’t turn explicitly into a ghost story, which could have been fun, nor does it work to emphasise a spiritual connection between the two characters until the very last moment. 

When an uptight introvert meets an ebullient extrovert in a film, it is supposed to generate conflict, which gives dramatic energy to the narrative, but Knock Knock Knock has no conflict and, therefore, no real drama to speak of. The opening scene has a wonderful two-minute single take that starts to delve into the two characters a little bit, but some important information is delivered in a rush, almost as an aside, and no other scene elaborates on the details we get here.

For close to 40 minutes, Mukherjee manages to sustain our interest in Dada. By the end, however, we still know too little about him to care about this character, so when the climax comes, it falls flat. Keta, who always appears out of nowhere, is even more of a blank slate: He exists only in relation to Dada, and this relationship never becomes anything more than superficial.

Knock Knock Knock is clearly a personal film for the director (it’s his hands drawing the crossword puzzle in the opening shot). But given the ambiguity and lack of urgency, it does not hold the same emotional sway as Loev and never achieves the balance that its characters refer to. “Nothing is random, right? There’s a pattern in everything”, says Keta, but the pattern here can be hard to decipher. Never awkward enough to thrill us and never intimate enough to really make us care, the clues to this film, itself a kind of crossword puzzle, are too vague and leave us with a few rows unfilled.

There are some interesting ideas here, from the resemblance between a crossword puzzle and a chessboard to a climactic shot showing only one of the characters where we expect to see both. The key to unlocking the central mystery may very well lie in Dada misspelling “camouflage”, which is precisely where the narrative proper starts, but the viewer has to let her imagination do the work to fill in the blanks.

Die Kandidaat (1968)

André Crous

More than 50 years after its release at the height of apartheid, Jans Rautenbach’s Die Kandidaat has lost none of its bravery nor any of its razor-sharp comedy.

South Africa
4.5*

Director:
Jans Rautenbach
Screenwriters:
Jans Rautenbach
Emil Nofal
Director of Photography:
Vincent G. Cox

Running time: 100 minutes

During the nearly 50 years of apartheid in South Africa, Afrikaans was the language of authority. In terms of power, the country belonged to Afrikaans whites first, then to English whites, then to no one else. When Die Kandidaat (literally “The Candidate”, although the film never had an English title) opened in 1968, the turmoil from abroad broke on the African shores, and the result was a breathtakingly robust manifestation of artistic resistance to the staid and seemingly stern status quo of segregation. All without featuring a single non-white character.

The director, Jans Rautenbach, was all of 31 years old when he directed this, his first film as a solo director. Boiling contemporary Afrikaner society down to nine representatives on the board of a big Afrikaans company, the Adriaan Delport Foundation, he exposes factional infighting and uncertainty with seriousness, insight and generous helpings of comic relief when conservative and progressive viewpoints are pitted against each other. 

These representatives, in whose company we spend most of the film, are:

  • Lourens Niemand, businessman and chairman of the board
  • Paula Neethling, the founder’s daughter (and apparent socialite)
  • Reverend Perholdt from the Dutch Reformed Church
  • Anna Volschenk, head of an Afrikaans women’s organisation
  • Herman Botha, farmer
  • Prof. Hannes van Biljon, proponent of the Afrikaans language
  • Wilhelm Esterhuysen, carpenter
  • HP Greeff, deputy secretary in the civil service
  • Anton du Toit, writer

The nine board members are tasked with protecting and propagating the culture and alleged values of Afrikaans speakers. They are meeting to choose a new CEO, and according to the charter, their decision has to be unanimous. But the boardroom is not a homogeneous entity, and people’s views – however slight the difference between them – easily create divisions. 

The titular final candidate for the position is Dr Jan le Roux (Roelf Jacobs), an outwardly strait-laced member of society who runs Seunsdorp, a reform school for teenage boys who have lost their way. The board’s chairman, Lourens Niemand (Gert van den Bergh, who died on the eve of shooting his final scene), and Paula Neethling (Marié du Toit), who wields extraordinary power even though (or because) she is the late founder’s daughter, are adamant about pushing the nomination through as quickly as possible. Their strategy is to allay their fellow board members’ fears with a mere wave of the hand. But one of them, a writer called Anton du Toit, has done his homework. Not only does he want to undermine Paula’s authority for personal reasons, but as a writer of the Sixties movement, he wants to stir the pot. And stir it he does.

Before long, he recalls that the foundation’s regulations require that the CEO be a “genuine Afrikaner”. This ostensibly innocuous moniker quickly leads the nine decision-makers to discuss the label’s applicability to those who do not fit the stereotype. In a country where “Afrikanerness” rests on so many different pillars, the latter’s various definitions can overlap each other rather imperfectly. Are so-called coloured South Africans (of mixed heritage), most of whom speak Afrikaans as a first language, also Afrikaners? Are white speakers of Afrikaans who do not belong to one of the main Protestant denominations? And those who do not follow the governing National Party? And those who have an English spouse?

These questions quickly create division among the members, thus pointedly indicating an unspoken division within white South Africa, too. In a couple of brilliantly timed moments of levity, the arguments even escalate to fisticuffs. Despite the glossy veneer of the boardroom, with its stained glass windows and statues of Afrikaans heroes (according to the government of the day), these men and women can still grab each other by the throat when they get hot and bothered by a viewpoint they don’t share. But while Du Toit is the one stoking the fire, it is the eloquent albeit slightly uptight Le Roux who serves as the flint.

Rautenbach’s opening credits sequence cleverly depicts this symbolism. A series of static shots showing statues made of stone turns dynamic with the appearance of Le Roux. In fact, his arrival appears to have a material effect on the camera. The initially immobile frame suddenly embarks on a whirlwind of a semi-circle movement. The rest of the sequence consists almost exclusively of shots obtained by either moving (tracking shots) or swivelling the camera (pans). 

The scenes in the boardroom are a bit of a one-man show, with the heterodox writer, Du Toit, asking all the taboo questions. But we know he is right, and therefore, we are always on his side. His anti-establishment streak also clearly targets the board’s two most powerful members, Niemand and Neethling.

Neethling is the one with the most authority, however, and her outfits both emulate and rival those of Cleopatra. By contrast, Niemand, whose surname literally and very appropriately means “nobody”, is a vacuous embarrassment. Throughout the film, he is slow and completely befuddled, loses his train of thought and cuts a pathetic figure when he puffs on his cigar. He is a pushover for whatever Neethling wants, and we realise right at the end that she was blackmailing him all along. As a symbol of the upper echelons of power in Afrikaans society, his character is a devastating indictment of the absence of direction at the top.

The action is set almost exclusively in just two locations, but what Die Kandidaat lacks for in breadth it more than makes up for in depth. And while the scenes in the board room are the most daring, half the story concerns an evolving tragedy at Seunsdorp, and we gradually come to realise how the two tracks fit together both narratively and thematically. One of the boys gets injured while spraying chemicals outside. A troublemaker and hardened criminal, Izak, who instigated the incident, fingers a shy classmate, Kallie (Regardt van den Bergh), as the culprit. There is a diversity of thought and character here among the Afrikaner boys, too, and it is not always easy to label any of them as either good or bad. Once they are branded as a problem, however, as someone who doesn’t belong in society, they carry that label with them for the rest of their lives, like a skin they can’t shed.

In this regard, the discussions at the foundation are fundamentally related to the ups and downs of these boys on the fringes of society. As a former member of a youth gang, Le Roux is the perfect bridge between the two worlds. Far from the modern art and the book-lined walls of this bubble of Afrikaner superiority, he has a much more practical approach to spreading the gospel of Afrikanerness.

But the many skeletons that tumble out of the closet in the board room are a thing to behold. Through their slips of the tongue, naïveté and revelations of closely guarded secrets, we discover many of the supposedly upstanding representatives of Afrikaner society are, in fact, human, after all, and differ from each other, even if that is the last thing the government wants. We learn that Neethling’s late husband, the previous director of the foundation, was a true disaster. We learn that she jilted Du Toit for Le Roux, and he abandoned her for someone else, although the film’s timeline is a bit muddled. Greeff’s wife speaks English. Le Roux is engaged to an English-speaking South African, and she’s Catholic, too. Niemand has the biggest secret of them all, but it is the arch-conservative Mrs Volschenk who gives the film its most priceless moment in an exchange with the controversial Du Toit, whose literary work she considers indecent:

Volschenk: You can’t tell me anything about “life”! My husband and I travel abroad quite often. Last year in Paris, I also encountered your “sex”. All of a sudden, these… girls… started chatting to my husband out on the street. It was terrible. I was so shocked that my husband put his foot down and ordered me to head back to the hotel at once to calm down. The poor man. He didn’t return to the hotel until several hours later.

Du Toit: I bet he was very tired…

Volschenk: Well, naturally.

Rautenbach builds on and vastly surpasses the entertainment of King Hendrik, a political comedy released three years earlier and directed by Emil Nofal, who co-wrote and produced Die Kandidaat. King Hendrik, set in a South African town that was never fully incorporated and, thus, decides to declare independence, trod carefully around (but didn’t completely ignore) hot-button issues like apartheid and Afrikaans–English relations. For Nofal, the drama of division was a source of comedy rather than reflection, but in Die Kandidaat, Rautenbach strikes the right balance by intensifying the drama while letting the lighter moments bubble to the surface when appropriate to reinforce the drama.

More than half a century after its release, Die Kandidaat remains an extraordinary piece of political cinema, especially because the questions it poses about Afrikanerness have never been adequately answered. It never feels like the work of a first-time director with too little life experience or who is trying to say too much. On the surface an inquiry into the slippery definition of an Afrikaner, it offers an honest appraisal of Afrikaans society, warts and all. It is a film that likely would not have received any support from the Adriaan Delport Foundation. But there’s no making a masterpiece by simply playing by the rules, and pushing the envelope can often get the message further.

Django Unchained (2012)

André Crous

In Quentin Tarantino’s best Western, Django Unchained, a slave set free by a German bounty hunter takes the South by storm.

Django UnchainedUSA
4*

Director:
Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter:
Quentin Tarantino
Director of Photography:
Robert Richardson

Running time: 165 minutes

Django Unchained is an unconventional love letter to the Western. It’s not a popular genre today, although the Coen brothers with some modest success tried to revive it with their 2010 film, True Grit. But Quentin Tarantino, the golden boy of cinema for the past 20 years whose name has unduly become synonymous with the gratuitous depiction of violence, has the magic touch and proves his mastery of the art form once again.

The film is excessively violent, but, among the slow-motion explosions of blood as if from flesh volcanoes, there is an incredible story of one man’s quest to find the woman he loves and reclaim her from her owner. With the exception of the film’s climactic shootout, which puts the bloodletting of The Wild Bunch to shame and ends with a manor house whose walls are covered in blood from the floor to the ceiling, the pace is mostly steady and not a single moment is wasted.

What will stir viewers’ attention more than anything else, however, is the language of the film. It is unlikely that the word “nigger” has ever been used this often by white characters in a film. Occurring more than 100 times, it pervades their speech to such an extent that it is tough to remember whether skin colour is ever explicitly mentioned. Tarantino gets away with it because even though the word is used almost as frequently as an article, it never ceases to remind us of the time and place the central character, a freed black slave, is up against.

The former slave is the titular Django (Jamie Foxx), who is set free by the German dentist Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter who travels on horseback, followed by a wooden coffin with a plastic tooth on top bobbing up and down as he crosses the South in search of those wanted by the law.

Schultz is a peculiar creature who doesn’t seem to mind violence – besides, he is a perfect shot – as long as he gets the guy. He forms an instant bond with Django, mostly because he needs Django’s help in tracking down three brothers worth a lot of money dead or alive, and Schultz prefers them dead. But when Django tells Schultz about his wife, Broomhilda von Shaft (yes, of course, the surname is a reference to the big-name ’70s blaxploitation movie), sold to a big slaveowner, the German bounty hunter has a personal interest in ensuring his friend and colleague gets his wife back.

We thus find ourselves watching a quest, and it is every bit as exciting as Tarantino’s two Kill Bill films, in which the central character pierced and sliced her way with a samurai sword until she reached the object of her affection. However, Django Unchained has about 30 minutes of post-climactic appendage that go off on a tangent.

This final act is separated from the film’s first two hours by an extended shootout, bloody to the point of excess, that sees Tarantino struggle to keep things together. He satisfies us with small details in that final part, including his explosive presence as an Australian slaver and some beautiful shots right before the end credits start to roll, but, in retrospect, this last section seems a big digression that doesn’t have the same driving force as the rest of the film.

The duo of Foxx and Waltz sounds like an odd couple, but Dr. Schultz – a character that calls to mind Waltz’s role in Tarantino’s previous film, Inglourious Basterds – has a playful, almost childlike streak that is captivating, if one can overlook his penchant for shooting people through the head.

Foxx, playing a variety of roles that see him as both a slave and a slaver, a lover and an assassin, is by far the coolest cucumber in the story, though Tarantino uses those (Sergio Leone kind of) extreme close-ups on his eyes for poignant moments, and this tactic works like a charm. It is no coincidence that the music of Ennio Morricone, a composer associated with Leone’s films, also features in Django Unchained.

Aside from the many gunshots and the cussing, the film also has some slave-on-slave ultimate fighting to the death, called “Mandingo”, and as the film takes place shortly before the Civil War, there is an epic scene with Klansmen.

It is Samuel L. Jackson who steals the show, perhaps to the detriment of the film. As a slave who has lived with his master, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), for so long that he now shares Candie’s disdain for blacks, he is truly odious, a traitor to all the oppressed people around him, to freedom and justice, too, as he revels in the authority his connection with the white Candie grants him. An Uncle Tom for the ages.

The film is certainly not intended to be a very serious discussion about slavery, but it is a very entertaining one, and it doesn’t ignore the importance of past iniquities. This might come as a surprise to some, but it shouldn’t, as Inglourious Basterds already proved Tarantino a skilled craftsman even when dealing with the suppression and extermination of Jews during the Second World War.

It is no easy feat for a film to keep our attention for nearly three hours, but the director succeeds effortlessly. His style of entertainment necessarily includes people being shot to a bloody pulp, but when they’re all really bad guys, one tends to have fewer ethical objections, especially when everything is so clearly “just a film”.

Mr Tarantino, to quote Calvin Candie, “You had my curiosity; now you have my attention.”

The Club (2015)

André Crous

The Club is an unapologetic indictment of the sick structures that allow paedophile priests to continue their lives without facing justice

El ClubChile
4*

Director:
Pablo Larraín
Screenwriters:
Guillermo Calderón
Pablo Larraín
Daniel Villalobos
Director of Photography:
Sergio Armstrong

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: El club

If there was ever a film to put the final coffin in the Catholic Church’s case for credibility after decades of allegations about sexual abuse, paedophilia and cover-ups that involved the rotation of sex offenders from one parish to the next, it is Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s The Club (El club). With a plot set in a coastal town in the very recent past, it examines the activities of a group of four former priests who have been banished to an isolated house, along with a former nun, where they are expected to repent for their sins, which all relate to child abuse.

One of the opening scenes is a stunner and sets the stage for an hour and a half of tension that ultimately ends with an act so monstrous the fury quickly boils over from within the viewer because these supposed messengers of God reveal themselves to be nothing more than self-centred criminals who destroy innocent people and animals in order to keep their skeletons intact. In this particular scene, a victim of one of the former priests arrives at the home and proceeds to publicly castigate the priest at the top of his voice by going into detail about the sex acts the priest committed with him when he was an altar boy.

Paedophiles are mentally ill, and they should be treated, but if they commit sexual acts with a minor, such behaviour ought to be looked upon the same way one regards the acts of a murderer – with disgust and abhorrence – because the two acts are very closely aligned. It might seem like charitable (what some might label “Christian”) behaviour to love and support these people, but when they refuse to change and demand forgiveness, either because they don’t know what they are doing or because they are sinners and Jesus died for their sins, too, we need to stand up and refuse to grant them forgiveness, because they insist on destroying others in the quest for (temporary) self-gratification.

The majority of the five people comprising the titular “club” in Larraín’s film, his first since the beautiful true-to-life No, which depicted Chile’s landmark referendum in 1988, cannot even bring themselves to admit they are gay, much less that they sexually abused the minors in their parishes, and the same goes for the nun, who was sent to the house after her mother had accused her of beating her adopted daughter, an act of which she still proclaims her innocence.

When a prisoner is seeking parole, the board has to examine whether the individual in question shows any remorse. If there is no contrition, the person remains a menace to society and should be kept isolated. On a side note, this was the major problem with another film shown at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the same year: the Czech documentary Daniel’s World (Danielův svět), whose main character never elicits any empathy from us because he revels in being sick and seeks acceptance and understanding from society instead of help.

Early in the film, Father García (Marcelo Alonso), a young adviser with a background in psychology, arrives on the scene with the goal of steering the priests onto the right path, but he is of little help, and the four men and one woman have a great deal of experience in manipulation, to which he eventually succumbs. This film is a tragic indictment of the human evils harboured, sometimes with pride, by the very priests who are meant to protect their flocks from the wolves, and when cold calculation is carried out with a smile, as is the case with Mother Monica (Antonia Zegers), we feel a collective chill running down our spine because we know how prevalent these people are across the world and how much damage they have caused to people everywhere.

The Club is unapologetic in its treatment of its characters, and that is as it should be, because any hesitation on the part of the filmmaker would have weakened the impact of the film. This is a serious topic that requires a blunt approach, and Larraín does not back down, even when it comes to showing the more graphic consequences of the former fathers’ decision to stay in the house rather than integrate back into society.

There are moments of hope for the characters, especially Father Vidal (Alfredo Castro), who calls himself the King of Repression and comes to closest to admitting his urges have persisted despite (or perhaps because of) the prohibition on receiving pleasure – masturbation is forbidden, of course, but so is taking long showers. Eventually, little matters because the evil these men (and woman) are capable of when push comes to shove will be shocking to even those who have followed the scandals of the Church through documentaries and fiction films over the past decade.

On the whole, this film suggests that the structures that kept in place these places of refuge for sex offenders should be burnt to the ground and take their culture of moral authority, divine entitlement and protection of one’s own with them on their way to Hell, which is without a doubt where these people belong.

Viewers who have problems with animal cruelty – especially inflicted on domesticated animals – would be well advised to steer clear of this film. The ghastly acts committed in the final act will hit you hard.

Viewed at the 2015 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival