Word: goya
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...roams with the eye of a connoisseur across a canvas or a Greek façade. To dramatize the relationship of life to art, she has juxtaposed film clips of an Olympic sprinter with photographs of a runner molded in bronze, contrasted bullfight scenes with paintings by Goya and Picasso...
...plot--it either limps or goes sprinting out of sight--concerns a young man (Jean-Pierre Leaud) who falls in love with a girl (Chantal Goya) and for various reasons has a hard time keeping up with her. One reason is that Miss Goya enjoys a lesbian relationship with one of her roommates. Another is that she's a yeh-yeh girl just breaking into echo-chambers and the Top 40. But the most important reason is that Miss Goya is a bitch goddess: she looks like a captivating thirteen-year-old and possesses the assurance of a woman...
...Miss Goya may sound formidable, but half the mystery springs from her not acting formidable most of the time. Godard captures her self-centeredness by focusing on her trivial gestures--incessant slow hair-combing, contemplative re-rouging, a monologue that skips carelessly from sex to her new blue coat. Leaud plays a jokier person than Miss Goya, except when he is with Miss Goya. We watch while he and a Marx-spouting companion lounge in a cafe, get up one at a time, borrow sugar from a table nearby. The two are inspecting the breasts of a lady sitting...
Godard uses the closeup at the end when an inspector asks Miss Goya what she will do now that her boyfriend is dead (a silly accident) and she's pregnant. Miss Goya repeats in a still voice, "I don't know"--her face almost expressionless. The effect is ambiguous, exactly like the end of Breathless. Is she finally touched by something outside herself? I don't think so. This is the closest she will ever be to having her self-containment shattered. But it can't be shattered. And just as her non-involvement protects her from an awareness...
...JOURNAL (shown on Mondays). "A Few Castles in Spain" focuses on the current Duchess of Alba, her husband, her children and her castles. Along the way, she also mounts a defense of her notorious ancestor, the "Naked Maya" of Goya...