To Have and Have Not

If Howard Hawks' low-key WWII thriller To Have and Have Not seems a bit too much like Casablanca for comfort, the film goes a long way towards making up for its lack of originality in the accumulation of small details and the fine central performances that Hawks brings to the film. Obviously contrived as an attempt to restage Bogie's iconic turn as Rick, this "sequel" once again sets down Humphrey Bogart in the middle of contested wartime Martinique, this time as the fisherman-for-hire Harry Morgan, doing his best to stay out of the increasing strife between Vichy sympathizers and the "Free French." I'd normally summarize some more of the plot here, but Hawks seems largely unconcerned with it, so I'll just go ahead and admit that so was I. There's something about a rebel (Walter Szurovy) who needs to be ferried into Martinique, and for some reason his on-island allies decide that Morgan is just the man for the job. There's a daring escape from a Gestapo patrol boat, and an inquisitive and leering Gestapo captain (Dan Seymour) who's putting the screws to Morgan to find out what he knows.

With all this at stake, both for Morgan and Martinique as a whole, you'd never know it from the film's meandering, laidback pace — despite the trappings, this isn't really a suspense film, or a spy film, or a wartime thriller. It's a showcase for Bogie, and especially for his sizzling onscreen romance with first-time actress Lauren Bacall, sauntering onto the scene as the young girl on the run from her past and adrift on her own. Bacall is the film's real star, delivering a stunner of a performance that threatens to make even Bogart recede into the woodwork altogether. As soon as she slithers into Bogart's room for the first time, uninvited and interrupting a frantic conversation concerning the Resistance fighters, she takes over the film with her sheer presence. She just wants a light, but she might as well have said, "Hey, forget all that spy stuff, look over here." Even the way she asks Bogie for a match, her mouth twitching suggestively and her hips nestling against his doorframe, telegraphs her raw intensity and sensuality. Her chiseled marble face, already looking wise beyond her years, is a fount of subtle emotion, and she invests her cipher of a character with far more depth and complexity than the writing deserves. Just looking at her, the way she carries herself and the way she speaks and the way her eyes move, is to know something of her story and what she's like. Her sidelong glances, cast back over her shoulder, freighted with hidden meanings, carry a static charge that can't help but energize anybody hit with that blazing stare.

Bacall manages to carry her character, "Slim" (a typical Hawks nickname), through even the script's unusual excess of misogynistic tripe, which seems a bit much even for a Hawks film. It's not enough that the film is populated with one "silly dame," it has to add a second (Dolores Moran as the frail wife of the French Resistance fighter), and has both of them confess to Bogie that they're "making a fool" of themselves in front of him. These women both seem eager to apologize to this man they hardly know, and the film's weaker moments require a real suspension of disbelief to see the rock-hard Bacall making gestures of contrite acquiescence towards her leading man. It's slightly more bearable when it's Moran in this role, playing a one-note weak woman who faints at the slightest provocation despite her initially hard aura. The whole second woman thing is silly to begin with, so much so that even the two leads seem to realize it, and consequently Bogie downplays his reaction to this interloper even as Bacall downplays her jealousy. The result adds some pleasant friction to these scenes, and even comes close to redeeming the contrivance altogether.

Elsewhere, there's the usual undercurrent of Hawksian machismo, a sense that women shouldn't get in the way of men's stuff, and that the men who allow such intrusions are somehow cowardly and weakened by it. The script requires Bogart, who's clearly outmatched by the fiery Bacall, to nevertheless get the best of her, seeing right through her and condescending to her at every turn. Only Bacall's innate toughness allows her character to come through it unscathed, and as a result it's hard to take Bogart's bluster too seriously in relation to her. Instead of two equals sparring, it seems more like Bogart's putting up a masculine front in an attempt to save face. But it's a vain effort, and once he finally gives in to Bacall's charms, the game is lost. After one passionate clench, she tells him to go shave and gives him a playful slap on the cheek, a bit of S&M foreplay that mirrors an earlier scene where the Gestapo slapped around the completely unfazed Bacall as Bogart watched.

The film also offers up one other uncontested pleasure on the acting front, and that's the surprisingly nuanced turn from Walter Brennan as the hopeless old drunk Eddie. Brennan played the grizzled old coot, the comic relief sidekick, in countless movies, practically making a career out of it, but this performance is something of a revelation for anyone tempted to dismiss him as limited in range. Eddie's character is well within Brennan's comfort zone, a washed-up drunk who was, Morgan says, once a great fisherman, but is now just about useless. Brennan infuses this character with a ragged charm, a rambling, discursive wit, and an incredible amount of pathos. He's a man who knows he's used up, who clings to his last loyal friend with a puppy-like dedication and obedience. And yet he's also a soulful, complicated character, displaying flashes of a shrewdness that must be a carryover from his youth, and a sense of humor that's all his own. His frequently repeated joke, "was you ever bit by a dead bee?" coaxes some subtle repartee out of Bacall, who distinguishes herself by playing along with the old man instead of just dismissing him like everyone else does. In the two brief exchanges they have together, which mirror each other towards the start and end of the film, Brennan and Bacall prove why they're the film's true linchpins, as Bogart just stands off to the side and smirks.

Hawks is wise to let these fine actors just do their thing, and he's also wise to keep the focus as far off the plot as possible — the action happens in fits and starts only, with long scenes of moody, atmospheric stasis in between. Especially characteristic of Hawks are the many scenes that take place clustered around the piano in the local hotel. It's here that Bacall delivers a trio of sultry, low-voiced torch numbers, and where the local pianist (Hoagy Carmichael) croons out a handful of smarmy ballads. Hawks loves this kind of scene, with musicians and audience alike gathered around the piano, as many people crammed into the frame as possible, fostering a sense of warmth and camaraderie that is very dear to Hawks' heart. Variations on this scene recur frequently in his films, most notably in Only Angels Have Wings, though none of the scenes here have the poignancy, urgency, or depth that the similar scene possessed in that film, where the gathering at the piano took the metaphorical place of a drunken wake for a dead friend. Here, these scenes are just atmosphere, helping to infuse the film with a distinctively Hawksian character but not adding up to much otherwise. The same can't be said, fortunately, about a similarly crowded scene around the bedside of a man with a gunshot wound as Bogart attempts to remove the bullet. Hawks orchestrates this scene with surgical precision, culminating in a shot where Bacall stands in the foreground, holding a bottle of chloroform and fanning away the fumes, as across the prone body of the patient sits Bogart with scalpel in hand, two assistants holding a lantern and a water basin over his shoulders. This careful clustering also creates that tight, cluttered image that Hawks loves so much, though here the deliberate arrangement of the figures and the tensions that all focus on a single point as small as a bullet, create a scene of lasting power.

Despite its limitations, this is a sharp, smart film from Hawks, one that completely dispenses with its ostensible subject in order to squeeze in as much of the good stuff (Bacall!) as possible. Hawks presumably recognized the film for what it was, a somewhat cynical remake of a film that had, after all, only been out two years earlier with the same actor in the lead. And instead of taking it seriously, he decided to take to the margins and just have fun with it, letting Bacall's saunter and Brennan's wit take over the film. This holds true even down to the final shot, in which the central trio walk off into the foggy night together towards unknown adventures. Bacall executes her exit with as much aplomb as her entrance, slithering offscreen with a playful sway to her hips and a smile on her face, as Brennan agreeably bops his shoulders in sympathy. In keeping with the film's wry spirit, this trio doesn't just walk off into the fog; they dance off.

The Ossuary/Dimensions of Dialogue

Jan Svankmajer's The Ossuary hinges upon an essential dialectic that is at work at every level of the film's construction. It's a dialectic between the past — represented by the amassed bones of mankind's countless dead — and the present, the living. Between the closed book of history, its story already written, and the in-the-moment nature of modern politics and socio-political action. And perhaps most importantly, on a cinematic level, between the image and the soundtrack. Svankmajer's film is set at the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, a macabre masterpiece of design in which the entirety of the chapel's interior decorations, from altars to goblets to wall hangings to a tremendous chandelier, were constructed from human bones. It's a horrifying work of art, carved entirely in the remnants of the dead, meticulously arranged into an ossified testament to mortality.

Svankmajer's task for this film was simple enough, to craft a straightforward cultural documentary about the famous tourist site, its history and the jaw-dropping images that could be seen within its walls. The result, though, is anything but straightforward. From the very beginning, Svankmajer signals the importance of sound to his aesthetic, as the soundtrack introduces a series of metallic grinding noises from a bicycle chain. This kind of scraping, rattling, grating noise forms a central element in the film's soundtrack, as though to suggest the rattling of bones through an accumulation of similar noises. Even the ossuary's cranky old tour guide, who provides a crotchety commentary throughout a tour of the chapel interior, is characterized by a dry, brittle, croaking voice, complementing the scrape-and-rattle orneriness of Svankmajer's soundtrack.

Moreover, the tour guide provides the perfect outlet for Svankmajer's satirical outlook on this material, and he takes every opportunity to contrast her discursive commentary and hectoring with the cold reality of the images from the ossuary. The tour guide's monologue encompasses some of the history of the chapel, who was buried there, and its official status as a sanctified mass grave, but she is much more concerned with matters of money. Not only is she a shameless shill for the site's (apparently many) for-sale items, including replicas of family crests of prominent families buried there, but she also hands out stiff fines for even the least suggestion that someone has touched anything. The film ends with her enraged screaming at a seemingly befuddled young boy who she keeps accusing of touching the bones, furiously demanding money as penance. "Me?" he asks plaintively, a bit astonished. This woman, never seen throughout the film, only heard, is also inordinately concerned with the fact that the chapel's centerpiece and grandest construction, a massive chandelier of human bones, once fetched an offer of 100,000 American dollars for its sale. It is not enough for this woman, indicative of tour guides the world over, that this absurd, hideous, and fascinating art object simply exists, that it was made and toiled over and still hangs hundreds of years later. For her, this chandelier's grandest facet, its most memorable aspect, is the money it could be worth — or even better, the money that was declined in order to keep it, which suggests an even greater worth, possibly even incalculable.

This focus on monetary worth and petty economic bullying ironically makes this woman, living in the heart of Communist Czechoslovakia, an icon of capitalist excesses. It's apparent that one intent of Svankmajer's project in this film was the exposure and critique of a great Communist lie, namely that the elimination of capitalism was also the elimination of materialism. Rather, this woman's hectoring monologues make a marketplace not only of art, but of mortality itself, which becomes a mere spectacle to be consumed and perhaps commemorated with trinkets. Against this flippant outlook, Svankmajer chooses to simply juxtapose the horror, and the horrible beauty, of the ossuary, with its remarkable designs and assemblages. His images from within the church are arranged into rapidly edited montages that suggest an overall image of clean, purified death, an impression that Svankmajer counterbalances with an early shot of a snail slowly pulsing along the inside of a skull's eye socket. The ossuary is an attempt to tame death, to create art with death's leftovers, but although the church's construction possesses a strange beauty, its every facet serves to remind of death, to amplify death's awful power. The sight of so much death in one place, so artfully presented, is frankly terrifying and awe-inspiring. Svankmajer captures this fierce beauty in only a handful of long shots, in which the bone-lined walls of the chapel are almost overwhelming in their grandiose accumulations. The rest of the film takes on a much closer perspective, editing together brief shots of small portions of the overall design, focusing on individual details. The aura of mortality is no less horrifying for its specificity, though; in fact, the detailed examination of the multitude of individual bones that went into making each of the church's decorations only drives home the individuality of the people who once animated those bones.

In relation to this remarkable chapel, and the remarkable way that Svankmajer's abrasive montage amplifies its horror, the banal commercial blathering of the appointed tour guide are revealed as petty and inconsequential, attempts to wring every cent from a population herded like cattle until mortality overtakes them. In the context of Communist Czechoslovakia, this was a radical statement on the economic stranglehold of the state, a satirical commentary that did not escape the attention of the Czech censors, who promptly replaced Svankmajer's chosen soundtrack with a jazz song. In the original version, however, The Ossuary remains a remarkable film, a treatise on human mortality and the various attempts to control, escape, and even profit from it.

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In Dimensions of Dialogue, Jan Svankmajer presents three different wordless, abstracted visions of human communication and interaction, and the various outcomes that can result from such encounters. This is a darkly funny, but ultimately pessimistic, film on the impossibility of true communication. The film is divided into three segments, each preceded by a title; the first segment presents a "factual dialogue." In this scenario, three abstract creatures, assembled from a variety of bits of matter, take turns devouring and disassembling each other within a circular food chain that results in an increasing level of homogeneity and de-individuation. The three creatures each represent a different aspect of human society and life: an "organic" creature composed of fruits and vegetables; a "mechanical" one assembled from tools and gears and bits of metal; and a "scientific" one with its body covered in books and tools of learning and scholarship. These three assemblages stand in for three layers of society, from humanity itself at its most basic, organic level, through to the mechanical and intellectual processes by which humankind interacts with each other and the world around them.

Needless to say, the process in this first dialogue by which these three aspects of humanity continuously devour and vomit each other back out again does not present an optimistic image of human relations. In this recursive food chain, organic matter is devoured and regurgitated by machinery, masticated to make it finer for digestion, and also dissected, pulled apart in an effort to understand it. This is a continual theme of this section, the way that attempts at understanding inevitably lead to the destruction of the thing under examination. This theme recurs in the way that the "scientific" representative devours and dissects the "mechanical" being, literally crushing the manufactured output of mankind flat between the pages of a book. Finally, the books themselves become fodder for the newly reconstituted organic matter, which tears them to shreds in an effort to elicit every shard of knowledge from within them. This process is repeated several times, and with each iteration the three creatures become less and less defined, more battered and worn as their constituent parts have been chewed up and spit out over and over again. As the segment progresses, it becomes clear that this process is a gradual evolution towards three increasingly similar beings, which begin to look more and more human as their parts are chopped up into smaller and smaller bits, their edges smoothed and their formerly heterogeneous surfaces mashed into a fine, fleshed-colored paste. By the end of the section, all three creatures are molded from clay into generic human forms. This self-devouring destruction and dissection is thus a process that leads to the creation of humanity as it is today, still trapped in the same circular path.

The second segment of the film is entitled "passionate dialogue," and it represents every bit as much of an ugly view of humanity's possibilities for true dialogue. If the first segment presented learning, creation, and nutrition as ultimately just three different forms of destruction, this segment adds love, sexuality, and procreation to the list. The film opens with two near-identical clay forms sitting across from one another across a table, the only difference between their otherwise streamlined bodies and identical bald heads the presence of breasts on one of them, delineating gender. This romantic couple joins together for a kiss, the clay of their individual bodies slowly melding together, melting against each other's identical clay flesh, until the individual forms are erased in a fluid, oddly sexualized flow of abstract forms and momentary glimpses of a head thrown back in passion, a knee crooked up at an angle, a hand caressing a back. As in the first segment, interaction leads to the loss of individuality, but at this point sexuality seems to be a much more hopeful melding, a chance to create something new and beautiful from the merger of two individual forms.

This optimistic interlude is fleeting at best, however, and when the sex is over the two clay forms separate into two again, with one crucial difference: a single lump of clay sitting on the table between them, seemingly leftover material from one or the other, or both combined, now permanently separate and lost. Sexuality, for Svankmajer, is a beautiful moment, after which both people involved lose a piece of themselves — combined in the creation of a child possibly? — which can never be re-integrated or regained. And if the lump of clay leftover represents the joint creation of a child, then Svankmajer certainly doesn't have an especially sunny view of parenthood, given the fact that the two former lovers increasingly turn against each other in the aftermath of their union, first using the lump of clay as a weapon against each other and then literally tearing each other apart with claws and fists. This is a stunning sequence, as Svankmajer's blank-faced creations execute a complete cycle from love and union to rage and brutality. At the end of the film, the two bodies are once more melded into one undistinguished mass of clay, but the connotation this time is not union but mutual destruction.

In the final segment of the film, "exhausting dialogue," Svankmajer takes his concept of human incompatibility and the absurdity of attempts at communication to its not-so-logical extreme. This is the film's apotheosis, in which a pair of disembodied heads (with realistic eyes bulging out of their clay heads in bug-eyed stares) face each other across a table. The two heads take turns sticking out their tongues at each other, each one presenting the other with an object to use. At first, the two present each other with mutually compatible objects, so that their interaction is almost as harmonious at first as the sexual union that opened the second section. When one presents a pencil, the other offers a sharpener; when one emits a slice of bread, the other butters it with a knife; when one has a shoe, the other has the lace to wind through its holes and tie in a neat knot. As long as the duo are able to match their objects' functions in this way, the interaction between them goes smoothly and results in a mutually beneficial outcome. But the rest of the film serves the purpose of demonstrating just how rare and unlikely such peaceful coexistence really is.

Once the two heads have run through the possibilities of combining their respective objects in the intended ways, they begin a series of less fortuitous encounters, in which the pencil sharpener shreds the bread to bits, the knife spreads butter on the shoe, and the toothpaste tube sprays wildly as the shoelace wraps itself around the tube and ties itself into a bow. This surreal disjunction between intended function and context results in increasingly absurd and undesirable results, underscoring the extent to which the first set of positive outcomes were essentially random happenings with relatively low probabilities in contrast to the sheer number of incompatible combinations available. As a metaphor for human relations, it's a visually striking and perhaps frighteningly apt one.

In fact, the entirety of Dimensions of Dialogue is as visually sumptuous as it is thematically bracing. Each segment offers a very different visual experience along with its unique perspective on human relations, from the cluttered automatons of the first segment, continually breaking up into chaotic digestive processes, to the eerily streamlined clay forms of the second and third segments. It's also a startlingly funny film at times, especially in the absurdist extremes of the final section, even as the hope it holds out for human compatibility is alarmingly small.

Comédie de l'innocence

With the eerie, unsettling Comédie de l'innocence, Chilean-born director Raoul Ruiz approaches a Hitchockian psychological thriller with his light surrealist touch, infusing a narrative mystery with additional, even more inscrutable layers of metaphysical mystery. It's typical of Ruiz's surrealism that it often doesn't seem surreal at all — his surfaces are placid, realist, even mundane, and yet his characters seem to be acting at right angles not only to one another, but to the fabric of reality itself. It's a skewed view on the world, one in which nobody is behaving normally even when they're pretending that everything is going as usual. It is a favorite Ruiz theme for a "normal" person to fall into an absurd situation and then simply, stoically accept it, and in many ways that's exactly what happens here.

Ariane (Isabelle Huppert) is an ordinary bourgeoisie wife, a theater designer, painter, and sculptor who pours herself into her art even as she raises her precocious nine year old son, Camille (Nils Hugon). But when Camille, on his ninth birthday, suddenly begins referring to her by her first name and demanding that she take him to see his "real" mom, Ariane reacts with only moderate concern, and decides to endulge the whim. Furthermore, when they arrive at a destination dictated by her curiously changed son, they eventually encounter a woman named Isabella (Jeanne Balibar), who calls the boy Paul and is vigorously embraced as "mommy" in return. Even then, Ariane does not react with fear or anger or even — as she doubtless would if this wasn't a surrealist film — by calling the police. Rather, she invites Isabella to stay in her home while the three of them figure out what's going on. This stoicism somewhat dulls the otherwise intense suspense of the film, since it's difficult for an audience to get too perturbed by Camille's strange behavior and the possibility of his disappearance when even his mother is oddly sedate about the whole thing. But Ruiz doesn't necessarily even want his audience to get caught up in the suspense. The film's weird, detached tone is a conscious choice, and the effect is to highlight the psychological dissonance thrown up around the ideas of family, motherhood, and childhood by the film's central triangle.

In one of the film's most telling scenes, Camille is confronted with questions by Ariane's psychologist brother, Serge (Charles Berling), and the boy reacts with fear and confusion. He's simultaneously hugged by both of his mother figures, who attach themselves to him from either side, forming a bizarre tableau of motherly smothering. And yet throughout the rest of the film, Camille's real problem is not too much mothering, but too little. The film is a broad and scathing critique of the bourgeoisie family structure and the child-rearing practices of the modern privileged classes. There is no sense of true family ties here. Not only is Camille's disciplinarian father (Denis Podalydès) all but absent throughout the narrative, away on unnamed business, but Ariane is utterly detached from her son's life. Even his birthday celebration is drained of fun or joy, and immediately after the cake she sends Camille off on a walk with the nanny, Hélène (Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre), promising to catch up soon, and only eventually arriving much later than she promised. Even Hélène, whose relationship to the family is ambiguous — it's hinted that she might be related to them, and yet she's also sleeping with Serge on the sly — sometimes passes off the task of watching Camille to an unnamed friend. Paternal responsibility has been almost completely abdicated, by the absent father (whose sole words of advice for his son are, "sometimes you have to do what you don't want to") and the inattentive, self-absorbed mother, and even by the nanny forced to stand in for these proper parental figures.

In this atmosphere of uncaring laissez-faire childcare, the other "mother," Isabella, becomes something of a balancing figure, lavishing Camille with motherly attention and forcing Ariane to compensate by at least attempting her own displays of affection and warmth. But the relationship between the real mother and her son is sometimes tainted by a hint of Oedipal feelings, as when Serge finds them cuddling on the staircase and says they look like a pair of "lovebirds." This isn't the only suggestion of incest in the film. Besides the ambiguous relationship between Serge and Hélène (are they related?), the family has an incestual relationship in its past, part of the historical lore passed down through the massive house that Ariane inherited from the generations before her. And this undercurrent finally surfaces in the deeply unsettling ending, in which, after everything has been restored to "normality" and Ariane learns that her husband is returning, she poses for her son's ubiquitous video camera, fluttering her hands seductively through her hair. She's vamping for the camera, and for her husband, and of course for her son as well, and this weird Hollywood starlet moment ends with Ariane staring directly, unnervingly, into the camera.

Ruiz delves into this kind of psychological complexity throughout the film, always leaving things just ambiguous enough to allow for multiple routes through the film's thematic maze. Huppert and Balibar are perfectly cast, the former radiating her usual cool, subdued intensity, and the latter communicating a faintly sinister, manipulative vibe through her all-to-sweet smiles and warm voice. It's a brilliant combination, and the sparks never fail to ignite whenever these two women are on-screen together, even if the overall tone always remains calm and contemplative. There are no fireworks, no histrionics, but the emotion comes across anyway. Their struggle is metaphorically realized within the film by the strategic placement of a drawing of the biblical story of Solomon's judgment, in which the ancient king had to decide which of two competing women was a contested child's true mother. Ruiz takes the time to study the picture, as he does with much of the art strewn throughout the family's mansion, cutting to each of its crucial elements in turn, emphasizing the way the picture echoes the situation within the house.

This drawing remains in the background, and even becomes the subject of a circumspect conversation, during a moody candlelit dinner scene at which Ariane, Isabella, Camille, and Serge form a strange, fractured pseudo-family. This point is underscored by the way Ruiz films the scene, starting at the base of the table with Ariane and Camille to the left and Isabella and Serge to the right, the camera sweeping back and forth so that it angles behind one pair and then the other. This motion calls to mind a scene from earlier in the film, the dinner for Camille's birthday, where Ruiz moved his camera around the dinner table in much the same way (and it's a motion he would repeat around a much more macabre dinner table in his recent masterpiece Ce jour-là). In contrast to the later scene, the birthday party takes place during the day, lit by sunlight rather than candles, and the family pictured is a more conventional one — father, mother, son, and late-arriving uncle — but not necessarily a happier one. The film is not making, as one would think it might be, the conservative argument that the family unit is broken and traditional families are preferable. It's more like Ruiz is saying that families are broken, period, traditional ones just as much as their more unconventional counterparts. The birthday party, when the family is together, is a miserable scene and not much of a model for a happy childhood. In contrast, the relationship between Isabella and Camille provides more of a model for what familial love might be, but even that turns out to be not quite what it seemed.

Such deceptive surfaces are the true core and nature of Comédie de l'innocence, so much so that Ruiz even explicitly makes the truthful/deceptive dialectical nature of filmic images themselves a subject of the film. Camille is constantly walking around with a video camera, using it to document everything he sees. His filming habit at times elicits very different reactions from his mother, who is in one scene driven to tears as he spirals impassively around her with the camera in hand, and in another scene flirts and primps for the camera's steady gaze. The cinema, for Ruiz, is an impassive filter for emotions, equally capable of delighting or upsetting, and often in his films doing both at once. Camille later edits the footage he captures into expressive montages which heavily filter, distort, and process the imagery into a near-abstract blur of sensations, colors, and fragmented images. But these abstract video works later prove to reveal some essential truths about Camille and Isabella. For Ruiz, film tells the essential truth even when it lies by distorting, warping, or exaggerating reality, a maxim that certainly applies to his own films.

Pierrot le fou

Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou is a road movie, but one in which the characters move, not through any physical geography, but across the well-traveled terrain of Godard's own cinematic corpus, revisiting key themes and familiar scenarios from the nine feature films that Godard made in the five years preceding Pierrot. The film's pivotal placement at a turning point in Godard's career — after his most successful Nouvelle Vague hits but still before his increasingly radical Maoist period — makes it particularly ripe for analysis in terms of Godard's filmography as a whole. It features two of Godard's finest actors and his most iconic figures, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, the latter appearing in her penultimate role in a Godard film, with their divorce still looming ahead. Godard is also revisiting one of his key concerns from his pre-Maoist period, namely the nature of romance and the adversarial relationships that society sets up between man and woman. Not least of the film's echoes of earlier Godard ventures is the way its plot and denouement mirror the feminine betrayal at the core of Godard's first feature Breathless, in which Belmondo was also led to his death by romance and female duplicity. What's different here, and what may help Godard avoid the charges of misogyny that (often justifiably) have been brought against his films, is the extent to which Pierrot interrogates and examines this archetypal relationship.

At the start of the film, Ferdinand (Belmondo) is a discontented bourgeoisie, married to an heiress and himself unemployed after an unsuccessful career in television. He goes to a party where, in a brilliant parody of both TV advertising and Godard's own earlier commercial work, all the characters speak in lingo apparently stolen from ads, extolling the virtues of cars, naked women, and deodorants with the same antiseptic language. Ferdinand wanders through the party, and as he moves from one room to the next Godard arbitrarily applies garish color filters to delineate one space and set of characters from the next. The arbitrariness of the color-switching underlines the extent to which these people are, despite superficial differences in favored topics, all the same; their language, the language of corporate culture, erases all distinctions. The filters also inevitably bring to mind Godard's one big-budget production, Contempt, in which the producers demanded more nude scenes for star Brigitte Bardot, and Godard famously obliged with a lengthy bedroom scene, during which color filters similarly rotated at random across Bardot's bare butt. The device's recurrence here is a subtle in-joke, a reminder that Godard too had sold out and spoken with the language of commerce — and also a reminder of how a device of commercial necessity had been transformed into art.

In any event, Ferdinand soon leaves the party and returns home, where he encounters the evening's babysitter, Marianne (Karina), who is by chance also his ex-lover. The duo set off on an absurdist road trip that seems ill-fated from the start, triggered as it is by Marianne's never-explained murder of a man in her apartment and their flight from a gang of gun-runners looking for the money and weapons she'd been stashing for them. This sequence plays out with Godard's typical wit and obscurity, the actual visuals reminiscent of a slapstick Keystone Kops routine, with the lovers dashing in circles, grabbing the blatantly fake prop guns, and running in and out of cars. Godard fragments the scene, repeating key moments again and again, destroying the moment-to-moment coherence in favor of a vague sensation of danger, hilarity, and action. The voiceover track, meanwhile, further exacerbates the confusion, as Belmondo and Karina take turns narrating the events, sometimes finishing each other's sentences in a contradictory manner and sometimes looping back to something already said. Repetition is a key component of Godard's aesthetic, and it comes into its own in this film, a central element in the film's deconstruction of the road movie's place-to-place narrative.

Indeed, this film doesn't follow a trajectory from place to place so much as from idea to idea. Places are mentioned, but only rarely as concrete markers of locations. More often places and their names are representative of abstract ideas: America, Vietnam, the Riviera (which, as Godard points out, contains the word vie for "life"), Las Vegas. Oftentimes, when Ferdinand and Marianne are traveling, they seem to be moving from one Godard film to the next. Pierrot is littered with remnants of earlier films, especially Le Petit Soldat (a bathroom torture sequence and constant references to the Algerian War), A Woman is a Woman (a few ragtag musical numbers with Karina at her most charming), and variations on Godard's oft-reused trope of enumerating a lover's body parts to declare one's love, first seen in the previously mentioned opening of Contempt. Pierrot also looks forward in interesting ways to the next half-decade of Godard's work, already containing hints of the apocalyptic road movie vibe of Week-end in the staged car crash where Marianne and Ferdinand fake their deaths. More broadly, the theatrical undercurrent of the film, its brilliant use of color and blatantly manufactured settings, is the first suggestion of the Brechtian agitprop theater that Godard would incorporate into his work more and more with films like Made In U.S.A. and La Chinoise. And if the landscape of Pierrot is a microcosm of Godard's films, it's also a pastiche of world literature and pop culture, as the characters themselves sometimes make explicit. When Marianne gets bored of staying in one place for too long, languishing in a seaside hideaway surrounded by friendly animals, she suggests that they ditch this Jules Verne scene and get back to the gangster novel they'd been living earlier.

It's typical of Godard's concern with language that he has taken the tenuous relationship between words and things to its extreme, ignoring the "thing" altogether in favor of the word and the meanings it has taken on. Marianne and Ferdinand both distrust language, but nevertheless acknowledge that it is the only way to communicate, even imperfectly, and so they continuously attempt to understand each other despite the seeming impossibility of it. In fact, for perhaps the first time in these earlier films, Godard seems to be actually interested in teasing out the why of male/female relationships, rather than simply presenting their tortured façades. He occasionally seems to be falling into typically sexist dichotomies — Marianne speaks in terms of feelings, Ferdinand of ideas and art — but here he does so primarily to disrupt and question such bipolar divisions. In one key exchange, Ferdinand and Marianne position themselves along the emotion/thinking divide as they discuss what they like in life, but the actual words they use to describe their supposedly different outlooks turn out to be quite similar. This seeming verbal agreement of course doesn't stop them from reiterating their incompatibility and lack of understanding, but the question has nevertheless been broached. Are male/female disjunctions primarily a result of social strictures that enforce such separateness? Does language help or hinder attempts to eradicate these divisions? Why don't Marianne and Ferdinand understand each other if they seem to be speaking similar words? As usual, Godard doesn't answer any of these questions, he simply leaves them hanging in the air as just one element in this sprawling film.

Ultimately, what all this adds up to is the same thing that nearly every other Godard film adds up to: a dense knot of questions, inquiries, and ideas, tied around a much looser core of plot points and character sketches. It's the perfect summation for his early 60s oeuvre, not only because it draws so many of those earlier films into its orbit, but because it is the epitome of his filmmaking at that time. It's clear, in the sure, sharp aesthetic of the film — its jaw-dropping widescreen vistas, its crisp primary colors — that Godard's filmmaking had reached a new pinnacle and a new stage. Here, he trades in the ragged and jumpy aesthetic of the earlier films, with their endearingly stitched-together quality, and on his first color feature since Contempt, proves himself a master not only of the use of color but of the widescreen frame. In one particularly brilliant shot, he maintains a long view of Ferdinand frantically running along a beach, quickly panning back to accentuate the urgency and then, as though to undermine this atmosphere, executes a leisurely pan to the left, meandering away in the opposite direction from Ferdinand's racing form. As the camera pans up and left across the fluffy clouds and pale blue sky, it eventually reveals Marianne standing on a balcony, held at gunpoint, thereby further accentuating the urgency of the shot and linking the lovers across the expanse of sky. The way in which Godard toys with emotions and meanings in this shot, simply through the movement of the camera, is carried out throughout the film. Despite his continuing (and sometimes overriding) interest in words and ideas, Godard is also among the most visual and sensual of filmmakers, and it is this dichotomy of ideas and sensations that exists at the core of Godard's filmmaking.