Detective (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)

The trio of films that followed Jean-Luc Godard's return to cinema mirrored, in some cases, his early work. Sauve qui peut (la vie), Passion and First Name: Carmen matched up in thematic and (vague) stylistic terms with Breathless, Contempt and Pierrot le fou. But it is Detective, Godard's lightest since Made in U.S.A., that truly recaptures the spirit of his New Wave material. Filled with cinematic and literary references, populated by existential refinements of various generic types (detectives, mob bosses, black-clad hoods playing billiards with a cigarette dangling from their mouths, disintegrating couples, paid-off boxers), Detective returns the director to his reflexive roots for a lovely throwback tempered only by the slight melancholy of the New Wave performers who now look older.

Confining the action to the Hotel Concorde Saint-Lazare, Detective moves between three groups of people whose paths overlaps as they move about the hotel. Godard films static takes that emphasize the boundaries of his setting, rarely able to move his camera far back enough inside a room to go further than a medium long shot. On the occasions that Godard does manage to put some distance between the camera and his actors, it comes in the form of dazzlingly placed high- and low-angle shots of hallways and the expansive ground floor, taking an uncharacteristic pleasure in the shining commercial retreat that lacks the director's typical, ironic assessment of the gold-plated chandeliers and plush carpet. Yet even these big, beautiful shots segment the hotel's layout into a series of locations unto themselves, suites and bars in a void that suggest proximity to each other only because all the characters keep running into each other.

Why, even the individual rooms themselves do not obey the stillness of the camera shots, instead morphing to take on the personalities of whomever occupies their space. Pairing older actors (Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Brasseur) with younger lovers (Aurele Doazan, Nathalie Baye) tends to make rooms feel suffocating and morose, but the women on their own add life to these confined areas. Most liberating of all are the scenes that join Baye with "French Elvis" Johnny Hallyday as the fight promoter to whom Baye's husband owes money. The young lovers add a new New Wave spark as an erstwhile youth icon like Léaud gradually reveals his age as his character inherits his disgraced uncle's obsession. There are other tonal modulations as well, such as the claustrophobia that pervades the detectives' suite when Doazan takes the camera they use to spy on people outside and turns it inward to watch the watchmen.

Not much about Detective's narrative makes sense on a first watch, but as Anna Dzenis rightly says, Godard takes more pleasure in the "investigation" than the payoff. If the still camera setups and the sense of regret that pokes through the old men's philosophical and literary proclamations, Detective nevertheless bursts with life. I cannot say how happy I was to see Godard bring back the credits style of his early features, with letters appearing on a black screen. He even spreads out the credits for nearly 20 minutes, devilishly breaking up the film as it builds momentum. The broad genre touches give way to specific reverence when a beautiful scene of lovers entwined together throughout the hotel is juxtaposed with clips from Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. Most impressive, however, is Godard's use of stereo, placing each channel in contrapuntal relation to the other and to aurally reproduce the kinetic imagery of Godard's filmography. In the film's best scene, Léaud and Doazan spy on their marks down in the hotel's restaurant, the audio track splits to put the dialogue of the watched in one channel and in the other...music. Classical cues take the place of Léaud's speech, aggressive when a woman blocks his line of sight and makes a bumbling, attention-getting apology and lower as he confers with his colleague. The music fits to the mood of the image, or does it create that mood? Either way, the scene encapsulates this delightfully tossed-off feature, a relatively commercial venture that nevertheless shows off the ways Godard could always innovate.

Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)

Hail Mary follows logically from his previous 1980s work even as it marks one of the biggest departures of his always shifting career. The director's "return to cinema" demonstrated a director not returning to filmmaking (he never left that, even if he did become more of a videographer) but returning to cinema as something he believed could change the world. Though such films as Passion and Every Man for Himself use the fragmentary, analytical techniques Godard picked up with video experimentations, they also displays a return to aesthetic beauty for its own sake, poetic evocation given equal weight to the held-over Marxist theory.

But Hail Mary goes one further. Godard strips the film of the political underpinnings that inform nearly all of his films from the mid-'60s (and a few that date back even earlier) to this point, instead turning to matter of the corporeal and incorporeal. In retelling the story of the virgin birth, Godard breaks down the layers of deification and mythos surrounding the story to examine what such an occurrence would mean to the young virgin, to her relationship with Joseph (Thierry Rode), and to her sudden obligation to sacrifice her corporeal desires and wishes to serve something greater. Godard still employs dialectic, but here it focuses entirely on matters of existence, the split between the body and the soul.

Naturally, Godard portrays this dichotomy through the conflict of image and sound. We see Marie (Myriem Roussel) in plain naturalism: watching her play on her high school basketball team and lightly brush aside the sexual advances of her lover. Over such scenes, however, Godard plays Bach and Dvorak, art made in the service of God doubling as His voice singing from her soul. Cutaways to pillow shots of nature—including recurring shots of the phases of the moon that come to represent Marie—poeticize the image, but otherwise the director maintains an honest appraisal of the woman and her figure that always grounds the soaring, sacred beauty of the music.

That Godard films Roussel and her frequently nude body with such straightforward, matter-of-fact openness represents a step forward in his always contentious views of women. One of Godard's most recognizable thematic tics—the elevation of the female prostitute as the ultimate symbol of capitalism and its commodification of everything up to and including the body—made up such a fundamental part of his canon that the director's renewed interest in the topic coincided with that vaunted return to film. But the cut-up manner in which he filmed women's bodies, simultaneously reflecting and critiquing the male gaze as a materialist fetish, is nowhere in sight in Hail Mary. Instead, he films Roussel's body on its own terms, as an instrument of sex and life-bearing. And when Joseph and, less sinisterly, Marie's gynecologist, attempt to invade that body, Godard does not frame their gropings as Marxist analogy but physical reality. As if to further delineate this method from the director's usual style, Hail Mary occasionally cuts away to a teacher and his female student debating matters of sex and religion in theoretical abstracts, their conclusions of the impossibility of Marie's conception hilariously useless when juxtaposed with that impossibility happening before our eyes.

Yet if Hail Mary frames its subject in the most pared-down, apolitical manner of Godard's career to this point, it also emerges one of his most evocative, and humorous. When the Lord needs something a bit more blunt than Bach to communicate, he sends a messenger, here identified as "Uncle" Gabriel (Philippe Lacoste), who looks less like an angel than a vagrant suspiciously toting around a young child. His dubious legitimacy adds an element of extreme discomfort to his instruction on God's will, but he can also be farcical, as when he responds cryptically to a taxi driver and his child companion chides, "That's not your line, Uncle Gabriel!" Shots of women toying with Rubik's cubes make for amusing interludes whose obviousness morphs into density as Godard holds the shots. A placid montage of close-ups inside of flowers would be an almost Hitchcockian visual pun were labias not already so prominently on display, therefore allowing the images to exist as poetic, sumptuous art for its own sake. Joseph's frustrated lack of sexual access gives an insight into how the Biblical Joseph might have reacted to his wife's news, but might his pent-up aggression be an indication of what the "real" Mary might have faced?

Before one can ponder that too long, however, Godard shows Marie gaining the upper hand in their relationship, eventually converting Joseph to the cause of raising the son of God and leaving her untouched. But even this domination comes at a price. Dutifully putting her faith into the idea of bearing a child as a virgin, Marie nevertheless reflects upon what the elevation of her spirit means for the body "I am a soul imprisoned by a body," she says in voiceover, though if she sees her corporeal shell as limiting for her spiritual growth into a goddess, she also recognizes that her beatification will strip her of her natural sexuality. My favorite insight into this aspect of Marie's reflection comes from Christopher Long in a brief review appended to DVDBeaver's analysis New Yorker Video's DVD of the film. He brings up a connection to Roman Polanski's seminal horror film Rosemary's Baby, about a woman bearing Satan's child. Long notes that carrying God's baby could be as harrowing as the devil's, but not why: Polanski's film served as a twisted allegory for women being forced to carry their rapists' children to term, but does Marie have any more say in being the Lord's vessel than Rosemary does being Lucifer's? Polanski plays this for unrelenting terror, but Godard finds elegiac mourning in it. As Marie says right before the film ends on a close-up of her lipstick-rimmed mouth hanging open in the vague memory of desire, "I am of the Virgin, and I didn't want this being. I only left my imprint on the soul who helped me. That's all." In maintaining a platonic relationship with Joseph, Marie retains her independence. In entering into a "sexual" relationship with God, that independence is eradicated. Viewed through that perspective, the story of the Virgin Mother becomes one of subjugation, not exultation.

Ornette: Made in America (Shirley Clarke, 1985)

Restored and reissued by Milestone Film, Ornette: Made in America offers a fascinating visualization of some of the most exciting music of the 20th century. Shirley Clarke's techniques illustrate Ornette's enduring avant-garde chops, as well as the clear melody and structure that runs under even the wildest free jams. As a film about a neglected genius, Ornette could have taken the usual biographical tack of offering an overview of the artist's life interspersed with the plaudits of admirers. But though Clarke does amass some colleagues and friends to sing Ornette's praises, she wisely lets the art have the final say in the worth of its maker, using his contemporary performances as proof that he is still a vital, original voice adding mayhem to the American Songbook.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.