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Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket depicted the inner world of a thief. Such artistic empathy is what makes for an edifying cinematic experience at the Cinematheque Francaise. However, when you are in Paris and have your wallet pickpocketed in the Metro, as is such a common occurrence that it’s become a rite of passage for tourists and inhabitants alike, the esthetic qualities of such loss take second place to feelings of rage and violation— followed by the realization that one must spend hours on the phone with varying banks, credit card companies and government agencies in order to restore stolen documents and make sure they are not used for fraudulent purposes. Godard’s Breathless also comes to mind. Nothing like watching the final scene in which Jean Seberg hovers over the body of the dying Belmondo on a Paris street at some revival house in or out of France on a rainy afternoon. Alas, the criminal, as existential hero in French novels and films, becomes something entirely different when confronted in real life. In Greek Tragedy you have your deus ex machinas who restore order The Parisian pickpocket is a devil ex machina, a god of unruliness, inflicting little physical harm, but working almost surgically to remove all the feelings of tranquility and timeless beauty that Paris has to offer.
The imagined traffic jam of Godard’s Weekend
, the imagined dispossession of Empire of the Sun
, the Spielberg classic derived from the novel by J.G. Ballard—we have become the repository of these two images. In a massive traffic jam filled with cars loaded with goods from foreclosed homes, where will the traffic go when it’s finally gotten off the highway? Steinbeck imagined the refugees of the Dust Bowl traveling from Oklahoma to California in The Grapes of Wrath
, but now the ground is shifting under our feet, and there are whole populations that have become unseated from their once familiar worlds. What will be the fate of Floridians who have left acres of deserted condos? What will become of itinerant Katrina victims, whose lives were turned upside down by nature just in time to meet up with an economy that is as unresponsive to stimulus as a patient suffering from flesh-eating bacteria is to the most potent intravenous antibiotics? California, under constant threat of defaulting on its borrowing, has its own problems, and no longer holds out the hope it did during the Depression. Meanwhile, a new tax package that will add over $900 billion to the debt over the next two years competes with a federal judge’s rule about the unconstitutionality of compulsory insurance. The safety net of social security is under siege, and what will be the fate of Medicare and Medicaid in our deficit economy? The Joads were Steinbeck’s archetypical family. Who will rescue their contemporary counterparts? Who will make a place for them at the table?
“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) .
An internal combustion engine turns fuel into energy that powers things like pistons. There is a wonderful scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut), recently revived at Film Forum, which makes an engine out of bodies. Two prostitutes have been hired to service a wealthy businessman and his assistant. One prostitute, played by Isabelle Huppert, stands in front of the businessman. Every time his assistant licks her ass, she has to apply lipstick to the businessman’s lips. Meanwhile, every time the businessman steps on the other prostitute’s breasts, she has to blow the assistant. The actors mechanically emit sounds that enhance the machine-like effect. On one level, prostitution in the movie is a metaphor for the relationship between men and women—in one scene Huppert’s pimp beats her up and makes her say “no one can remain independent.” But on another the level, interdependence becomes a metaphor for mechanization, the division of labor and, inevitably, the alienation of man from the product of his labor, which, in the case of the scene in question, is physical love. One of Godard’s points is that love is no longer freed from the context of industrial society and the means and modes by which things are produced. The prostitute is not an exceptional creature, but rather an illustration of the commoditization that affects everyone. At one point Huppert meets up with Nathalie Bye, her counterpart in the film, who is attempting to break off her relationship with a filmmaker named Paul Godard. Huppert’s prostitute sells her body in order to buy the dwelling of a woman who has previously sold her soul. The quid pro quo is reminiscent of the earlier sex scene and the equation is also curiously similar: man + woman = 0.
Alberto Moravia wrote La Disprezza in 1954, and the novel later became the basis for Jean Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mepris
(Contempt). Both the novel and the movie concern a hack writer, Paul, who is hired to pen a latter-day version of The Odyssey. Contempt stars Fritz Lang as the director, Jack Palance as the producer, Michel Piccoli as Paul and Brigitte Bardot as the writer’s all-unknowing wife Camille. The poet Anne Carson touched on her recurring themes of French New Wave cinema and classics, of which she is a professor at the University of Michigan, in the recent Academy of American Poets Blaney Lecture, held at Manhattan’s Philoctetes Center. Carson provided a Marxist economic analysis of the Homeric world in which the society of elites pass their wealth around “to reify their noble status.” Lewis Hyde and Marcel Mauss’s notion of the gift economy received a new interpretation from Carson, who described the gift as both inalienable and a sign of dependency between the giver and the recipient. Carson contrasted this with the mercantile exchange of goods for profit between two independent parties. What does this have to do with Contempt? The answer was provided with a segue into the making of Godard’s film, for which American producer Joseph E. Levine paid five million francs to hire Bardot, and then blew his top when there were no nude scenes. Godard is the latter-day Odysseus in Carson’s retelling of the film’s creation myth, full of canniness and irony, knowing how to bridge the gap between the gift (the opportunity to create art) and his need to survive as a filmmaker. Neither Bardot nor the uneducated character she plays is a Penelope, but Carson quoted Oscar Wilde—“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it”—in explaining Godard’s caving to the lure of a box-office draw like Bardot in his odyssey to become one of the major figures of the Nouvelle Vague.
