Word: godard
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Director Jean-Luc Godard often seems like a sprinter who keeps trying to run the mile - and fails. This time he goes the distance: Les Carabiniers is quite possibly Godard's finest film since his first, the artful Breathless...
...abandoned itself to love and chance, casting aside the restraint that characterizes the form and color of Demy's previous Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, a strangely gloomy film marked more than anything else by ugly purple wallpaper. Shot in primary colors which contrast with dominant whites (not unlike Godard's Le M*epris), Demoiselles is less a synthetic than Cherbourg because of its reliance on apparently natural light sources and location sets. A ubiquitous sunlight links the interiors to the outdoor shots much better than Demy's style is able to do and, as in his Lola and Baie...
...thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly; in this spirit the youth of Paris plays at planning revolution. Or so it appears in this porous satire by protean Director Jean-Luc Godard (TIME...
...Chinoise, the title is a sardonic reference to a girl (Anne Wiazemski, the second Mme. Godard) who fancies herself a China doll. Godard pokes fun at her windy braggadocio and her comrades' pompous planning with numberless nose-thumbing cinematic tricks. Players step out of their roles to tell the camera their biographies. Scenes are interspersed with stills of Alice in Wonderland, pictures of Stalin, shots of comic strips. The director's off-camera voice constantly interrogates his performers, who stop acting to reply. Visually, La Chinoise is almost entirely successful. The rapid shifting of subject matter, the kinetic...
Unfortunately, Godard this time has squandered his prodigious technique on a feeble fable about a one-dimensional collection of bourgeois undergraduates who appear to be trying on Red to see if it flatters their complexions. In the end, nothing about La Chinoise can be taken seriously-neither the mock-revolutionaries, who cannot commit a terrorist act without knocking off the wrong man, nor Godard, who fails as a satirist because his preening pupils, full of the pop and pap of the New left, are already a satire on themselves. Despite sonorous allusions to such major artists as Brecht, Goethe...