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From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UamPvhIhlZE/TymGNITBM5I/AAAAAAAAAJw/ hs5Xwh9OWRA/s1600/418TRCHEMZL.jpg |
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard
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From http://www.actingoutpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/GodardnewAdd4.png |
The digressions and narrative
co-exist in a film methodically put together. The first quarter of the film has
the opening credits split across introductory scenes introducing the characters
and situations. Narrative wise, it's tremendous, and despite the circumstances
of its green lighting, it's treated as a full story with great performances and
a novel take on the stories, willing to mix crime narrative, drama, even
slapstick intercut into other scenes within its various plot strands. What differentiate
it from the sixties films of Godard's
its evoking is that it also shows the transition from Godard's final cinematic
period of the 80s to staying within experimental filmmaking fully to the
present day, with Historie(s) du Cinema
(1988-1998), Film socialisme (2010) and various short films after, the
seeds of them clearly visible in this pulp detective work. Sound and the use of
it is the first thing you notice, the first film of Godard's which was in
stereo. Dialogue continues while the image onscreen cuts to something or
someone else, an almost-cut-and-paste collage of speech and music, all
classical, taking place when exposition and character building conversations
are fragmented, making one conscious of the structure of audio in cinema. It
works to add to the narrative, while other moments have music intentionally jarring
to the content of the scene on purpose. The film is as much about communication
and disruption of it as it is a crime story. The multi-plotted story itself is
as much about miscommunication, where barring a final series of shootings, most
of the conflicts are through words. It's surprising how this film reminds one
of American indie films, especially Jim
Jarmusch, a genre narrative broken of its conventional plotting structure
with additional allusions to philosophy and especially cultural items.
Characters are pulp figures but still have time to be built up, fleshed out, through
Godard's musings on life, able to use
such thoughts, like the reason pornography is called 'x-rated', as part of the
metaphors and thoughts of the characters as much as his outpouring of his
thoughts outside of cinema.
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From http://medias.unifrance.org/medias/253/218/56061/format_web/detective.jpg |
Books populate a lot of the film,
piled on mass on Prospero's makeshift desk in his hotel, his and Neveu and
Arielle's names directly referencing The
Tempest. Characters read a lot generally. Quotations are countless, spoken
and in narration, and is even part of Fox Warner's character, a copy of Lord Jim he keeps with him, opened
randomly to any page in a time of crisis, giving him advice in whatever passage
he reads. It's impossible not to think, as communication is part of the
narrative, how Godard is also
directly commentating of how the way to communicate has changed in the period
the film was made in. Cutaways to a media store, the neon of Cassette Audio and
Video Cassette, in the colours of the French flag, tangential to the narrative,
but in a film that plays with audio and visuals, a comment of how film and
culture in general has changed from the Sixties crime films of his and cinema
in general. Discussions on pornography in an era of video tape and porn
theatres, to classical films on televisions, the black-and-white celluloid
images fuzzy on the screens, evoking tropes repeated here in the story or, as
characters watch Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) in each other's arms, how its
part of their lives as pulp characters as they are for the viewers. Arielle,
with Prospero's interest, films directly out of their hotel room window with a
film camera prominently, the grainy images from it the first of the entire film
around it; it cannot be ignored, as Godard's shows, that the images are
distorted even in these narratives as they will be for cinema as the technology
did indeed change over the next few decades or so.
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From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/e/e0/Detective_Godard.jpg |
Détective has a very unconventional, tangential style to it compared
to other Godard films in general. Still a Godard
crime film, in what one would expect, but aspects stand out differently with
this one to the others. Prospero is trying to figure out a crime, the random
murder of a man known as the Prince, that is far too simple to be explained,
confounded further by the Mafia boss also being known as the Prince existing at
the same time, Godard's habit of dissecting genre and cinema taking a
metaphysical tone here alongside with a meta one. Mostly within the main hotel
location, barring one or two scenes outside, the setting is an unmapped series
of corridors, stairs and rooms, beautifully filmed in static shots, but
out-of-reach from reality. Where characters are hidden away in blackened billiard
rooms, or squashed up together in hotel rooms, and each other's hotel rooms for
that matter. In an almost sci-fi touch, with Fox Warner's extended circus of entourage,
including a young girl unexplained in her prescience playing an instrument at
times, he has access to a computer, part of the issue of technology being
addressed by the director, but one, when asked questions in outputs, able to
keep answers from the users on its own digression. It tips into legitimately
freakish horror in one moment with a dead mouse and blood coming from the least
expected place, asking what Godard
would've brought to the horror genre if he tried it. Characters populate and intrude on each
other's spaces, to comedic effect at points especially with Jean-Pierre Léaud as a sleuth keeping
his eye on the situations around him or running through those he has no
connection to. Entangled romance takes place, adultery and cheating one's
lover, the follies of the heart, alongside misguided views and the deluded
belief money is easy to come by, all spoken through Godard's quotations,
experiments and reflections of the period. The result is sewn and weaved
together without issue, a delicately balanced mix that works more so on a
second viewing and shows its masterful constuction.
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Abstract Rating
(High/Medium/Low/None) - Medium
Altogether, Détective works both as a Godard
experiment and as a genre film, but it is definitely an unconventional
work as crime narratives go. It works as a great take on the tropes of a
b-movie thrillers, in that it gets to the point in its fragmented tone, while
still fleshed out, and letting the experiments work for the story and for the director's
intellectual concerns. The experiments themselves do not detract from the full
narrative, but they would be disarming to anyone encountering Godard for the first time, and take
these well worn tropes into unexpected areas. On a second viewing, it still
causes one to sit back and take in the level of experimentation you do not get
in most cinema, marvelling at them, fascinating in its moments where it steps
into separate observations. The advantage that makes the film more abstract is that
is still works as a film, and it is immensely entertaining in that area.
Gripping as a very talkative, cool toned crime story, each character subplot of
interest when one puts together the pieces of each, and taking on a very
different take on them for original results. It is a funny movie at times and
despite the events of the end - beautifully set up with a use of a clip from an
older film for one of the meta references - it finishes with high spirits which
contrasts fully from the cerebral content and the seriousness of points. The
hybrid of completely bold, uncompromising experimentation and genre actually
manages to work and it's never conventional because of the melding.
Personal Opinion
It is to the director's credit,
while very much transitioning to his winter period of filmic essays already
signposted by films before like Slow
Motion (1980), that he still made a film that cares for its narrative as
much as the musings. From a script from a producer who was willing to fund his controversial
take on the immaculate conception in Hail
Mary, Godard uses it as a suit,
an aesthetic, for his own ideas while still making it as was desired under his
own terms. It turns back on the films from his first Breathless (1960) in the sixties, but with the matinee looks of a Johnny Hallyday against moments of the
director disrupting his work further than the jump cuts of decades before. The
two sides, of the past Godard and the
one he would become after this, cooperate fully and the transition is felt here
immensely with great results. This is also a film where a character pretends to
do boxing sparring against his girlfriend's bared breasts, following her
directions of which to box, the largest Toblerone
I have ever witnessed in the flesh or in image, a clumsy waiter joke, self
conscious computers with digital paint portraits of an actress in the film on
them, and a monologue of how one washes their hands shows who they are that'll
make Quentin Tarantino look like he's
a twelve year old trying to write cool dialogue in comparison. With Godard, then or today, you get the
intellectual meat but plenty of material and images you'd never see in most
people's work, or together in one film like this, and it adds together to more
than a plodding art film but something artistic with great character to it.