Tag Archives: Michel Legrand

Twin Peaks “Rest in Pain” [1990)

Science thinks it knows what religion doesn’t.

Religion thinks it knows what science doesn’t.

Science thinks.

Religion feels.

Romance is a sort of religion.

Unthinking.

But beautiful.

These are the issues in this rather unremarkable episode of Twin Peaks.

The romance of film criticism seeks to give no spoilers.

Break the code, solve the case.

Handwriting analysis…seems as old and mystical as phrenology.

Because today it is stylometry.

Were it not for Snowden, we’d still be in the dark.

ABSENCE OF LIGHT.

Hoping David Sanborn makes an album called Kryptos.

Or not.

I INSERTED THE CANDLE.

CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER.

EMERGED FROM THE MIST.

There’s easier ways to get jobs.

To make verb tenses agree.

And to verb agreements tense.

Word pie lay.

The fragments are essential.

Each piece.

Piece by piece.

With ice cream on the side.

Huckleberry H.

Scalia was whisked off.

Like a broom.

He had been a jack of one-eyed secret society.  Guest.  SS.

Pound’s poetry didn’t go this deep.

But deeper.

To Colombian hell.

It’s trying to think.

Puttin’ on the Ritz.

I thought it was her.

A cipher.

Shame on me.

Eric Da Re.  Doremi Fasol Latido.

Rest in pain.

Jawohl.

The biggest asshole in television history.

Vs. a perception sharpest blade mind ever.

Even for an actor.

Kyle MacLachlan.

Sherlock Holmes.

A perverse sense of knowing.

Raymond Chandler.

Several stops and starts to get here.

Like the end of Vivre sa vie.

And like the beginning.

Michel Legrand subject to the most genius whims ever.

Lynch is our Godard.

Where the Germans have Schoenberg, we have Ives.

Not the best metaphor.

But perfect.

Length trying your patience.

I know.

Like the end of Vivre sa vie.

Where we don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

That is the bathos of mechanical mayhem.  Haywire sob hiccups.

G’uh g’uh g’uh.

Over and over and over and over and over again.

The Vladimir Poutine syndicate have goldBRICked with the Meow Zedong overseas intelligence amoeba to form a truly Quebecois brand of! Godspeed.

Kinda like that hockey scene from Strange Brew.

Messiaen at the organ.

ils.

Sont.  Hellfire.  Bohemian.

No Moloch or Moulouk can do it justice.

Moulouk vs. Bébert.

Oui.  C’est Ça.

There’s always two sets of books.

 

-PD

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Bande a part [1964)

I need a word.  Just a word.  A word.  To start it off.  Nothing fits.  Frustration?  Yes, perhaps.  Ferment?  That might work even better.  It is a feeling.  I search for it on the Internet.  I cast my net to the blog sea.  Ahh, Valentine’s Day…  Yesterday.  How I wanted to write, yet I abstained.  Abstinence.  Discipline.  Youthful anarchy.

I needed a word.  As so I sought.  Abandoned, abandonment, abstract expressionism.  No.  Alex Chilton, Anna Karina.  Yes.  After two films she was back.  Here.  Anne Wiazemsky?  No.  We will wait for her at the Tout va bien café.

Art house, arthouse, Astruc?  Yes. Alexandre. caméra–stylo.  A free-flowing style.  Freewheeling.  Big Star, Bilinda Butcher?  Yes.  Feed me with your kiss.  Do you know how to kiss?  With the tongue?  That’s correct.  You stick your tongue out and I will kiss you on the cheek.

So I found my word?  No.  I found Bob Dylan, Boise, bored to tears.  A phrase.  Bresson.  Wiazemsky.  No, not yet.  But, pickpocket.  Yes.  Money.  A big stack of money!

Broken heart.  Ok, now we are getting somewhere.  And how does a heart break?  Neil?  Love.  CSS.  No, not the computer language.  Language?  We are barely passing English class.  Romeo and Juliet.  Verona.  Valentine’s.  The world’s shittiest Starbucks.  Right by my house.  Trust me.  I’ve been to Starbucks in middle-of-nowhere Arizona…in a fucking Albertson’s.  No, Target.  Maybe Wal-Mart.  No more depressing than the one by my house.  Sure, the buck-toothed high school senior was not much on the eye candy scale, but I am living in the same wasteland.  Neu Mexique.  The place where they tested the bombs.  Long ago.  Trinity.  I have become the destroyer of worlds.

No, the other CSS.  Tired of being sexy.  That one.  And Cary Grant.  Yes, my jacket’s at the dry cleaner…and I don’t have any money…so I won’t take off my coat.  Tou bi or not tou bi contre votre poitrine:  dat iz ze question.  Something like that.  Claude Brasseur.  What a brute!  What a fucking asshole!! !

Chris Bell.  The singer.  The white one.  Yeah.  Dead.  No.  Cinémathèque Française.  O-kay!  Now we are getting somewhere.  But I keep searching.  The English classes are not enough.  Maybe the Chinese will prevail.  Sami Frey is betting Chinese:  5-2.

Cocteau.  Yeah.  We’ll sit in the car and listen to the radio.  No, I’m not allowed to do things like that.  Hey, how old are you anyway!?!  Conlon Nancarrow?  Yes.  And the last time Michel Legrand on the big screen [English broken].

When it should be sad, the jazz kicks up impossibly happy.  Happily.  Hereusement?  I don’t know.  I am on the other side of the pond.

Crying.  Depressed, depression, depress-o-rama.  And then she feeds a tiger.

Doldrums.  No.  The other ones.  Not the horse latitudes.  Ennui.  Yes. She is bored, but she doesn’t know she’s bored…until she’s not bored anymore.  Euros Childs.  No.  Completely inappropriate.

Farfisa.  Maybe.  Pasolini.  Frankenstein.  Rasputin.  Claude Brasseur.  What’s your family name, Arthur?  Rimbaud, like my father.  But he’s dead.  As I pump a bull’s eye into the midway target.  Can I keep my chart?  [Crumples and throws away.]

Leave no traces.  Like the Situationists.  No more poetry.  Arthur Craven.  Shitty family.  It’s no joke.  We need that money.  I was in Indochina.  Don’t fuck with me.  Like Raoul Coutard.

Back to black and white.  Truly a film noir. Série noire .  Gallimard.  Says so at the end.  Dolores Hitchens.

Forlorn.  Ooh!  That’s a good one!  Any catch?  French cinema.  French film?  Harmony Korine.  No.  Later, later.

Henri Langlois.  Yes.  Now we’re back on track.  A name.  We needed a name.  Like Tarantino.  His production company.  Like the car scene with Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson.  Same thing.  They’re talking about nothing.  But they are incredibly rude.  Crude.  Blow a fucker’s brains out.  2.0

But the travesty is that Godard is forgotten in France.  ;that Quentin is cooler than Jean-Luc.  Quel dommage.

Howard Hawks.  To Jean-Luc.  And then who?  David Lynch?  Not very often.  Too many misses.  Same with Harmony Korine.  But those two are as good as it gets now.

Balls.  Giant figurative testicles.  The Madison.  Joseph Beuys balls.  Wolves and coyotes and felt and fat and goldleaf.  Heathen child youthful anarchy.  La Düsseldorf.  Klaus Dinger?  Motorik.

Driving like madmen.  Park on the curb…like Billy the Kid.  Drive on the sidewalk.  The Simca.  Do wheelies…no, donuts.  The mud.  The giant spools for wire.  Tightrope.

Lovelorn.  Ooh!  Nice!!  Lovesick.  Mauricio Kagel.  Yeah, now we’re getting somewhere.  Because, obviously, there’s a smokin’ hot girl out there in blog land into Mauricio Kagel.  Good strategy.

We are Sami Frey, here at Dossier du cinema.  We are Anna Karina.  We are schmucks.  We haven’t learned yet to embrace our inner Claude Brasseurs.

How ’bout that MØ chick?  Yeah, like her!  Except……………….monotony.  Morose?  Yeah, book it!  Nerval.  Hanging from the streetlamp.  Certainly.  Ophüls?  Nothin’.

Psychogeography.  Clichy.  The Louvre in 9:43…surpassing Jimmy Johnson of San Francisco.

AND THE SUBWAY SCENE!!!

Regret, rejection?  Yes.  Print it.  The man sleeping on the sidewalk.  Teddy bear or TNT.  Richard Hell or Richard Lloyd.  Routine.  Buy groceries.  Aunt Victoria.  Like the Queen.  And a big pile of money upstairs with the door unlocked and just a jacket draped over it.  200 million francs perhaps.  In 10,000 franc notes.

Silver screen.  It has to be silver, you fucks!  Spider Man does not qualify.  It has to be Louis Feuillade.  Jurassic Park does not cut it.  Did you see her thighs?  So white.  Black stockings over your heads.  Undo the garters.  It’s like Le Petit soldat all over again, but this time the terrorists are up and walking around.  That’s what terrorists do.  They terrify.  Burglers burgle.  Etc.  No torture…handcuffed to the robinet.

I don’t have time for this shit.  Shortcut.  Dying.  “Cheat death on the other side.”  J. Spaceman.

Someone to be nice to me for like five minutes and then I’ll leave you alone.  This was Jean-Luc “Cinema” Godard on fire.

-PD

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Vivre sa vie: film en douze tableaux [1962)

This.  This was the film which started it all for me.  My fatal love for cinema.  You must excuse me if I write in the tone which Godard employed.  It is one of the most complex branches of his filmlanguagetree.  And you must excuse me if I dabble Joycean here and there.

Really, it all started with a book by James Monaco called The New Wave.  Once upon a time my paperback copy had a cover.  I believe I paid 50 cents for the book…maybe 25.  But that cover is long gone and now my copy begins with page five.  Ah, but it is all so clear in my memory.  It was bathtub reading.  My first successful experiment with this was a few years previous when I’d read Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion during a particularly impoverished time.  Unemployed and discouraged, I had given up hope of finding gainful employment and, rather, resorted to afternoon baths with the erotic anarchy of Miller to keep me company.

And so it was…about four years ago, that I made Monaco’s book my mental edification during absolutions.  Yes, the book would inevitably get wet, fall in the water…even on the edge of the tub…but as it died, I lived.

First came Truffaut.  Enjoyable enough.  I rented all of his films I could find and imbibed the criticism of Monaco.  Then came Godard.  I had probably seen a bit of Sympathy for the Devil as a kid.  “What is this pretentious shit?!?,” I must have thought at the time.  Indeed, delving into Godard can be a shock in many, many ways.  Much later (as a young adult) I saw my first JLG film proper.  Week-end.  I was blown away by its brilliance, but still I didn’t equate the cerebral invention as specifically Godardian.  No, I chalked it up to the brilliance of the French in general…along with Renoir and Truffaut.

It would take many years before I returned to French cinema.  Girls came and went.  I changed dwellings often.  And as I started to read Monaco’s chapter on Godard I noticed an ad in the Austin Chronicle for a showing of the film in question:  at the University of Texas student union ballroom.  And it was free!

And so I strode off into the night and paid to park my car…it must have been December…a cold night if I remember.  I sat amongst what, at the time, I didn’t realize to be film students.  The whole concept was foreign to me.  It didn’t even register that UT had a film department.  I was a professional musician.  I knew music.  That was it.

And then it started.  “Somebody better check the projector,” I thought (as the sound seemed to sputter in stops and starts).  Something’s not right here.  Is she moving?  Yes!  You can see her lips move.  Wait, I just saw her blink!

And so Godard ushered the world (including Susan Sontag, back in the day) into his third feature film.  Hot off the unexpected success of Breathless and the 180 turn that was A Woman is a Woman, Godard again turned the tables on audiences.  The stark noir is reminiscent of Godard’s first film, but the mood is…moody.

This is, without a doubt, my favorite of Godard’s classic-era films.  I think it is the best movie he ever made.  His great work is Histoire(s) du cinema, but that is really other as Roland Kirk might have said.

We see Godard challenging himself here…filming actors from behind (multiple times throughout this picture).  After two features, he seemed ready to push, push…farther.  But along with these dodecaphonic experiments, there is still the magic of chance (?) like the woman emerging from the alley across the street, running as if late (while Anna Karina and mate play a leisurely game of pinball [another motif, that]).

This entire website owes its visual stamp to the third tableau:  La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc.  Karina sits in a movie theater, perhaps trying to forget her woes, and (to paraphrase Neil Young) she falls in love with an actress…playing a part she could understand.  The mysterious Renée Jeanne Falconetti…who only appears in this film and two others according to IMDB (one being a short, the other a blank page on Wikipedia)…  Suffice it to say that “Falconetti” (as someone in the theater (Godard?) can be heard to say during the silent scene-within-a-scene) is known today almost exclusively for her role in this Carl Th. Dreyer masterpiece from 1928.  As Anna Karina watches Falconetti and Antonin Artaud (also an actor in this film), she is brought to tears in what is the most cinematically delicate and gossamer-perfect moment of Godard’s entire (ongoing) career.

Karina is fantastic in this film.  The cinematic language employed obscures the pathos of her performance somewhat.  We don’t know whether to laugh or cry.  Indeed, in the ending segment of the whole film (think Magazine’s “Shot From Both Sides”) I let out a nervous laugh upon first seeing this in the theater as if I was Joan of Arc in the hands of Jacques Rivette (her funeral, my trial).  It’s amazing though how this movie hits me differently now with some years under my belt.  For all its panache, this really is a sad, sad story.  But in homage to B-movies, it doesn’t take itself too seriously…fumbling over itself like Chaplin bleeding to death.

I can’t/won’t discuss every aspect of this timeless Fabergé egg, but one scene bears mentioning above all the rest:  Nana’s dance.  It is Anna Karina at her best…trying to pretend she’s in a musical and not in a drab neorealist sob fest.  It is Michel Legrand at his best…providing the swagger of a Gainsbourg instead of the syrup which he poured on Demy’s fairy tales.  And it is Jean-Luc Godard at his best…making sure the billiard balls click during the pregnant pauses of a go-go, ye-ye number which otherwise would have seemed overdubbed. Even if it was, they still click.  That is the magic of cinema in the hands of Godard.  It is the jazz of foot traffic…the gambler’s audacious framing of everyday life.

-PD

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Une femme est une femme [1961)

I don’t know if it’s a comedy or a tragedy, but it’s a masterpiece.  So says Jean-Claude Brialy near the end of this film.  This is, indeed, a complex turning point in Godard’s filmography.  It is important to note that Godard made a film in between Breathless and A Woman is a Woman (Le Petit soldat), but it was banned by the French government because it focused on torture (as part of the ongoing Algerian War).  What is obvious is the dramatic shift from the stark noir of Breathless to the candied colors of A Woman is a Woman.

But there are many things strange about this relatively “normal” film (relative as regards Godard).  There is a sexual, existential tension between Anna Karina and Godard the director which is played out in a complex quasi-real paradox of a love triangle.  Bear with me…  Brialy and Belmondo are both symbols, but at times it seems that Belmondo is a symbol for himself.  Brialy is more obviously the “Godard” character.  Knowing the history of Karina and Godard, it might seem rather premature for them to be having relationship problems, but that’s why it is essential to note that her first film as Godard’s muse was Le Petit soldat.  [It would eventually be released after Vivre sa vie as his fourth film (and, importantly, after the Algerian War had ended).]

I would go so far as to say that Godard is weirder in this film (last I checked, the only of his films available on Netflix=his most lasting contribution to the mainstream) than Jodorowsky is in The Holy Mountain.  That might seem to be a stretch, but again:  bear with me.  Jodorowsky, while brilliant, is over-the-top in such a way which harkens back to the earliest of avant-gardes…the films of Dali and Bunuel.  Godard, on the other hand, while seeming to “play the game” to a certain extent was in actuality creating a new language.  Just the first few moments of A Woman is a Woman alone are enough to indicate as much.  The role of sound and music in this film is paramount.  While perhaps little noticed, Godard (together with the music of Michel Legrand) had developed a sort of audio jump cut.  He would use this device to greatest effect in the opening credits of Vivre sa vie.  The inexplicable stops and starts in both the soundtrack and the ostensibly synchronized sound (dialogue and such) serve to once again make the viewer subtly ill-at-ease (just as Breathless had done visually).

James Monaco had it right when he talked about the Nouvelle Vague exploding genres from the inside out.  Godard here chooses the American musical.  I could go on at length, but I will keep it short.  No one has dug deeper into themselves time after time to give the viewer a truly novel and thought-provoking experience than Jean-Luc Godard.  Understood on a strictly intellectual level, it is fascinating.  Viewed over the course of a long, persistent career, it is truly touching.

-PD

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