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Shelley’s “Ozymandius” is the playlist for this marching band. There’s comfort in the notion of living as vanity. Once you're born you begin to die. Are you guilty of comparing and despairing? Do you compare your insides to other people's outsides—even when that someone is no longer here? Parenthetically you may have wished to get the last word in, to get a reprieve which will allow you to ask or tell over the river of eternity, with its mythic rower, Charon. Today you wake up and feel almost relieved at the fall of an idol, but who knows? Tomorrow's another day.
Do you find yourself spinning like dervish or top? How nice it would be if one could harness that centrifugal force. Imagine confusion and sensory overload as an enormous implacable turbine, a satellite generator in some back road, emitting its persistent hum. You enter reality at Times Square. Someone points you to that tunnel leading to the A . You think "great," until you begin to realize you’re not going to get there so fast. You stare at your phone suddenly realizing you didn’t allow enough time No sense turning back, but the platform is three deep and it had already started to rain when you ducked into the subway. You’ll never get a cab. To make matters worse, it just happens to be one of those meetings. They can do without you but you’d rather make your presence felt. Now make a paradigm shift. You’re a subatomic particle pulled by the huge magnets of the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, on your way to becoming a boson whose fleeting existence will appear as a scratch. Movement creates kinetic energy is another way to look at it. You’re a fart, punching your way out of a paper bag and beginning to love it.
Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) which was recently revived at Film Forum is a gangster film--Tarantino reincarnated as a French director of the 50s. There are a succession of locations all either cafes, offices or bedrooms where gangsters hangout. The café has horrible dancing girls who wear pasties. Jean Gabin is Max, the lead gangster who is looking to have his uncle fence 50 million francs in gold bars. Rene Dary as Ricot is his pal. Jeanne Moreau plays Josy, the dancer who is leaving Riton. Above all the dancing girls are shots of other dancing girls in a state of undress, leading up to the Ricot's solemn deathbed scene in which there's full frontal nudity.Nothing really happens. One of the funniest scenes has Ricot and Max getting ready to go to bed, putting on their pajamas and brushing their teeth, with Ricot examining his chicken neck. One other element is the profusion of point of view shots, many of one group of gangsters or another driving and others of typically French winding staircases with an elevator rising to the top floor apartment of the local moll. The real source of the comedy is ultimately the fact that very little transpires. Waiting for Godot in French is En Attendant Godot. Touchez’s humor comes from turning its action genre on its head. What do gangsters do in between heists?
