Money Monster

There is more to Money Monster than meets the eye. Yes it deals with the familiar in the guise of a television show hosted by one Lee Gates (George Clooney) with hot dancing chicks accompanying supposedly hot stock tips. The first clue that something is amiss takes place in the initial disquisition in which Lee is setting up the day’s program in league with his producer Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts). The banter is interminable and you wonder if the show is ever going to go on the air. But that’s actually the point and it’s underscored by Jodie Foster’s brilliant surrealist direction. Gates, Fenn and the others on the set are caught in a kind of time warp. It's a little like Bunuel's Exterminating Angel, where the movie's characters are trapped in room or one of those episodes of Twilight Zone where people become prisoners of fictitious worlds. The claustrophobia is also a metaphor for the self-imploding financial world that the movie itself portrays where algorithms generate high speed trades. It’s a world that has very little to do with productivity and value and lots to do with a mixture of technologic overdrive and show biz. The human price of this kind of distorted value free universe is what the title of the film alludes to and these initial scenes in which one day’s fateful segment is being readied for broadcast are a wonderful and ominous presaging of what’s to come. The character at the center of the drama is Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell) who owes his provenance to Travis Bickle and host of other alienated figures who, as outliers and victims of forces over which they have little control, defend themselves with the creation of obsessional universes. Still, Budwell’s sparks of truth pepper the sky, like shooting stars in the great beyond. Kyle’s fate is as much a product of cinema history as it is of television news or the disreputable nature of the financial world (the final scene recalls Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless). Money Monster capitalizes on a certain suspense, but it's more like a soap opera than a cliffhanger and remarkably stolid and almost impassive in its depiction of its own version of flesh eating bacteria.

Pierrot Le Fou

Jean-Luc Godard had a fixation on the iconography of Hollywood and in particular the American gangster movie that was reflected in his first outing Breathless (1960), the movie which made him famous. However, the only difference between Godard’s gangsters and those he pays homage to rests in the aim of their activities. If possession is nine tenths of the law then Godard’s outlaws are interested in dispossession. In Pierrot Le Fou (l965), which was revived recently at Film Forum, his characters Marianne (Anna Karina) and Ferdinand aka Pierrot (Jean-Paul Belmondo) embark on a crime spree that's a repudiation of materialism. They’re Bonnie and Clyde conceived of as mini Raskolnikovs, philosophical nihilists who would be at home in the pages of a Dostoevsky novel. The world they flee is one in which Parisians talk to each other in advertising slogans (even Pierrot tells the attendant in a gas station to “put a tiger in my tank"). But Godard employs a dialectics that uses juxtaposition to pull the rug out from under reality. While the opening of the film thrusts us in the center of a bourgeois household, it also begins with a lecture on Velasquez and Pierrot's phone number is a Balzac exchange. Pierrot says, “I feel fragmented” and later “we have come to the age of the double man. We don’t need mirrors to talk to ourselves.” As the couple make their escape to a Crusoe type world, the camera focuses on Marianne even as Pierrot is talking. Godard who owes his filmic style to Brecht, makes no concession to illusion. When Marianne asks Pierrot what he is doing as he looks backwards in another scene, he says “I’m talking to the audience.” The movie posits an esthetic form of Joseph Schumpeter's concept of "creative destruction" to the extent that a utopian reinvention of both language and life is a subtext of Godard's narrative. For instance Belmondo repeatedly bristles when Marianne calls him Pierrot insisting repeatedly and comically, as if he hasn't said it before, that his name is Ferdinand. Pierrot Le Fou, is overly long and employs citations like a brilliant lycee student who knows his Baudelaire. But it’s also brilliant and Karina, whose personal relationship with Godard was in the process of dissolution during the shooting of the film (they'd been married, but got divorced), has the kind of beauty that might lure a filmgoer to his or her death.

Gaspar Noe’s Love

At one point in Gaspar Noe’s Love, his male lead Murphy (Karl Glusman), a would be director studying filmmaking in Paris, announces “my biggest dream is to make a film that depicts sentimental sex.” Audiences who see Love may ask why it isn’t simply called Sex, since the sex is graphic, and so ubiquitous that the brazenness becomes almost routine. During the Q &A the followed one of the opening night screenings of the film Noe remarked “I don’t see why there aren’t more genitals in movies. They’re everywhere.” But make no mistake about it Love is not  porn. Noe whose contribution to civilized society may lie in reintroducing the now almost extinct cosmetic notion of pubic hair into a world intent on Brazilian waxing, tips his hat to Courbet, particularly with respects to the painter’s famed “The Origin of the World,” whose wanton sexuality negotiates a fine line between beauty and provocation. From the first scene of mutual masturbation between Murphy and Electra (Aomi Muyock), the film uses sex to communicate states of emotion and being. A later threesome with a next door neighbor Omi (Klara Kristin) is a set piece. It’s not the climax of a dramatic scene, it's the scene. As in Blue is the Warmest Color, the sex itself tells the story. It’s the language of the film. The problem, in the case of Love, is that  the result creates a kind of schizophrenia that was not apparent in its predecessor, which was a seamless melding of sex and talk. With Love, the sex is more intelligent than any of the words iterated by the characters. Here for instance are a few examples of Murphy’s lines: “I’m just a loser, a dick and a dick has no brains,” “living with a woman is like sleeping with the C.I.A.; nothing is secret,” “I want to make movies that are blood, sperm and tears” “it’s raining, it’s cold and maybe we’re not the great artists we once dreamt we were.” None of this does justice to the complexities of the physicality the director portrays or from his singular view of sex a mixture of pain and babies. And the dialogue has caused some critics to ask how a film that’s shot in 3-D could have such bi-dimensional characters (though commenting on Noe’s use of erotic 3-D one audience member remarked that it was the first time she’d been cummed on by a movie). All this being said, it must be pointed out that Noe carries on the tradition of the European directors he obviously admires. Electra whose appearance recalls the vampish Jeanne (Maria Schneider) of Last Tango  disappears much like Antonioni’s Anna (Lea Massari) in L’avventura. His male lead wears a Fassbinder tee shirt and there’s a Salo poster on the wall of his apartment. And the notion of the outlaw as artist or in this case the artist as outlaw recalls the world of Godard’s Breathless. Noe, who made his reputation as the infant terrible of art house cinema with Irreversible and Enter the Void, has followed in the footsteps of giants while developing a cinematic vocabulary that’s all his own. N.B: If words fail, why not just use movement? Remember  The Joy of Sex? Why not produce a  graphic dance piece called The Pain and Joy of Sex? Such a work would undoubtedly play to sell out crowds.

Le quai des brumes

If you want to find the provenance of the final scene of Godard’s A Bout de Soufle (Breathless, l960), in which the dying Jean Paul Belmondo is cradled in the arms of his American femme fatale Jean Seberg, see Marcel Carne’s Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows (l938) now playing at the Film Forum. In this case it’s Jean Gabin lying in the arms of Michele Morgan on the cobblestoned streets of Le Havre. Michel Simon, the star of Renoir’s Boudu sauve des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning 1932) plays the role of a murderous lover of beauty. The great Jean Gabin who would later star in the movie version of Zola’s La bête Humaine (1938) is an AWOL soldier and Pierre Brasseur who would play the actor, Lemaitre in Carne’s great masterpiece Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise l945) is the cowardly gangster. Fog, leafless trees, rain slicked highways, and steam ship smoke stacks sounding off urgently as shots are fired all are part of the making of an impressionistic landscape that’s been termed “poetic realism.” In actuality Le quai des brumes might be termed an ode to French iconography. Amongst these are a cigarette perpetually hanging out of the side of Gabin’s mouth, a stray dog, an orphaned girl, an artist who explains his suicidal impulses by saying, “you have to kill someone,” a drunk trying to drink out of wine bottle which encases a miniature boat, a script by Jacques Prevert, a score by Maurice Jaubert and naturally the lone word “Fin,” with which all the great films of the black and white era end. Le quai des brumes, c’est Francais!

Breathless

“She dumped me or I dumped her, I don’t remember,” Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the feckless gangster in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless—currently in revival at Film Forum—tells his moll Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), a would-be journalist who hawks the International Herald Tribune on Parisian Boulevards, when she asks about his former wife. The cadence evokes the famous first lines of Albert Camus The Stranger (L’Etranger, 1942), “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” The syntactic similarity is not coincidental. From the moment that Michel picks up his gun and shoots a policeman, with the film’s haunting jazz theme in the background, the similarity to Meursault’s senseless murder of an Arab  is established. The only difference is that the desolation of North Africa is replaced by the dusty streets of the American westerns to which both the filmmaker and his two protagonists are attracted. Breathless is one example of translation failing to convey the poetry and meaning of the original language. A bout de souffle is the French title of the film, and it means literally at the end of breath. There are some wonderful exchanges, both of language and telephone numbers, in the film. Danton 0100 is the police. Élysées 8984 is one that Michel is always trying to get, and there is a Belle Épine number. But the final exchange of the film, when Michel is literally breathing his last breath, underlines the poetry of Godard’s title. Michel is dying, still mugging in his death, having made the choice of nothingness over grief in an earlier scene that foreshadows his demise and hearkens to Camus’s themes. Michel says, “Makes me want to puke,” and when Patricia asks what it means, the police detective who has been chasing Michel translates it as, “You make him want to puke.” The expression on Jean Seberg’s face is one of the most unforgettable in the history of cinema, ranking with the horrified open mouth on the nurse in the famous Odessa steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) .