Word: jean-luc
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...Yates, the British director who began filming John & Mary in Manhattan last week, calls it a "contemporary love story." It begins where romantic movies used to end?with the snuggling in the percales. After that, the script lightly flicks such switched-on subjects as astrology, hippies, fags, the Pill, Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend, May-September adultery, cinéma vérité film makers and, just for laughs, itself. From time to time, for example, it underlines the dialogue with subtitles...
...WEEKEND. Jean-Luc Godard gives the bourgeoisie a good drubbing in a satire that might have been sharper had its straight-faced Maoist political harangues not been so dull...
Between major works Jean-Luc Godard, like Graham Greene, composes entertainments. Pierrot Le Fou, made in 1965 but just released in the U.S., has little of the celebrated Godardian resonance. There are no impalements of the future, as in Alphaville or Weekend, nor is there much of the mordant social satire of La Chinoise or Les Carabineers. Godard himself feels that the film is merely "life filling the screen as a tap fills a bathtub that is simultaneously emptying at the same rate...
...Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard's version of the apocalypse, will undoubtedly be reviewed at greater length when some enterprising distributor brings it to Boston; it is at once a film so brilliant and so infuriating thta it not only provokes controversy in a given audience but within any single mind. Renata Adler's answer to reconciling its disparate elements was her suggestion to walk out and have a cup of Colombian coffee during the dull parts; I really haven't got the nerve to go that far, and suggest only that you accept the film's steady degeneration after...
...Chinoise reduces style to static set-ups and simple tracks ("The tracking snot is a political act," says Jean-Luc mystically); color is stripped largely to the primary range. Both decisions complement the didacticism of the young Parisian Maoists by omitting all but the starkest and most basic cinematic devices, also by reminding us constantly that we're watching a movie. Perversely, the lean movements and bright colors give La Chinoise charm and humor (not, I suspect, two of Godard's favorite critical adjectives) and make its polemicism entertaining...