I definitely want to make quick work of this one, and I've already sat on it for a couple of days so let me just sit right down and get it over with. I think it's fitting to give Jean-Luc Godard's Made in U.S.A. a hasty once-over, since the director himself banged it out on short order, actually shooting two films at once in the summer of 1966 (the other one being 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, which I'll get to fairly soon once I kick over into the Criterion films released in 1967.) This one happens to be the last feature of his that included his by-then ex-wife of two years, Anna Karina, and it's her presence in the film that supplies just about all the poignancy and emotional resonance as far as I'm concerned. While she's supported by a few familiar faces (most notably, Jean-Pierre Léaud in what amounts to an expanded cameo in which he gets to playfully mug a death scene and wear a huge button that reads "Kiss Me, I'm Italian"), her presence, more specifically her day-glo wardrobe and most especially her large radiant eyes, dominates the show. There are a few scenes early on in particular where Raoul Coutard's perfectly framed and lit close-ups of her face practically overwhelm the viewer, making it almost impossible to stay on track with the sketchy exposition that's being delivered at the same time... and that difficulty is only enhanced for those of us who have to rely on subtitles to understand what's being said.
The story itself is an inconsequential, ephemeral lark in which Karina plays the part of Paula Nelson, a woman waiting in a hotel room to meet up with her lover Richard (insert random sound effect here, since his last name is buried in the mix by noise whenever someone mentions it), only to discover that he's been killed, and now she has to go about the business of figuring out who did it and why. That one sentence summary, a thoroughly familiar set-up even considering the gender role-reversal, may include the trappings of a compelling mystery when put in the hands of other directors, but by this point in his auteurist journey, Godard seems almost entirely disinterested in hooking his audience into a story that delivers anything resembling a conventional resolution. For him, and for those willing to follow, the payoff is just watching him riff creatively as he amuses himself with a scattershot barrage of quotes, allusions, philosophical and political meanderings and pop art juxtapositions that have become pretty familiar themes and exercises to those of us who've kept pace throughout his previous films.
The Criterion DVD edition includes a helpful lexicon supplement that patiently spells out all those connections and indulgences in ample detail, but the amusement to be had here was in just letting the thing wash over me in a vague flourescent wave, watching Anna Karina recite her lines and go through her motions with weary and wary tactfulness, understanding that she was signing on for one last negotiated bargain with her former husband and would-be Svengali, a man who had almost single-handedly launched her career to a level of prominence that she wouldn't have likely achieved otherwise, whom she once loved but who turned out to be an unsuitable partner for going through life together.
As for Godard, he comes across as a man understandably hurt by his ex-wife's rejection and looking for new outlets to voice and vent the many turbulent ideas running through his mind. Politics, in particular the recent re-election of Charles de Gaulle in the French elections of 1965, becomes his main focus as the film proceeds, with his voice on tape delivering harshly pointed diatribes consuming more and more of the running time as he shifts our attention away from the overt contemplation of Karina's face that worked to such mesmerizing effect in the early going. I can imagine him going about his work fueled with the same embittered but determined resentment to press his point home with intensified passion that drove Michael Moore when he made Fahrenheit 911 and Sicko in the midst of the George W. Bush administration. For serious students of Godard, I suppose that this makes Made in U.S.A. a mandatory text for better understanding the direction he moved into after 1968, but I'm not going to bother going that deep here. As I've observed in several of my other reviews of Godard's films of this era (Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Pierrot le fou, Vivre sa vie, A Woman is a Woman), the most compelling thing about these films that I find to reflect on is how they align with the state of his domestic/romantic life - I'm more interested in the personal than the political side of JLG. And I'm pleased to report that at least, at last, Godard doesn't kill off Anna Karina's character, as was usually his habit back when he at least had a last desperate chance at winning her back. Here, he's content to part cinematic ways with her as a reasonable adult who understands the ways of this world, allowing her to ride off into an unknown future, a passenger in a car driven by another man.
So in this respect, Made in U.S.A. draws immediate comparisons with another film I recently watched, Robert Downey Sr.'s Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight. (I briefly discussed this and four of his other films on the most recent episode of The Eclipse Viewer podcast that I recorded last month with Trevor Berrett.) Both films, each dauntingly impenetrable in different ways, embody most, perhaps all, of their respective directors' signature aesthetic touches - for Downey, it's his consistent rapid-fire melange of caustic, profane humor and random absurdity for its own sake. But at a deeper level, they're both visibly grief-stricken elegies for failed relationships with women who were incredibly talented and remarkable in their own way but who turned out to be elusive or at least unwilling to remain in the confinement of monogamous relationships with their husbands. Of course I have no claim to any knowledge of who might have been more or less at fault in any of that, but I do believe that the emotional crises experienced by each of the men behind the camera, and the women in front of them, provide a helpful interpretive lens for what otherwise turn out to be dauntingly dense and occasionally impenetrable expressions of their creators' angst-driven minds.
Oh, and there's also that coolly incongruous, thoroughly gratuitous Marianne Faithful bit...
Next: Blow Up
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