King Lear (1987)

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy

Based on the play by William Shakespeare (I)

Cast: Peter Sellars as William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth, Burgess Meredith as Don Learo; Molly Ringwald as Cordelia; Leos Carax as Edgar; Julie Delpy as Virginia; Jean-Luc Godard as Professor Pluggy; Freddy Buache as Grigori Kozintsev ("Professor Quentin"); Woody Allen as Mr. Alien; Norman Mailer as himself; Kate Mailer as herself

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Do I need a name to see thy beauty?

It feels befitting King Lear's conception, as a film ultimately on the subjective nature of the word and image which is deceptive in how it can be read, was a contract signed on a napkin between the Cannon Group's Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan with Jean-Luc Godard. The napkin itself, not literally but subjectively, would form a divisive and curious production in Godard's career in its existence, especially apt as viewers can see that napkin themselves - whilst King Lear is dismissed, you see the contract in Mark Hartley's documentary on Cannon called Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014), one film interlinking and weaving into this one as King Lear itself interlinks in a variety of ways to history (even if own notorious one) in profound ways.

It was not really necessary for a viewer to read King Lear, as whilst contrary to its infamy of a Shakespeare adaptation by someone who never read the play, the truth is more that it does have quotations from the play but Godard specifically stretches one moment, the rejection on the daughter Cordelia from her father King Lear, and transforming it into his ongoing issues with the notion of language and communication.

The work's origins would have been fascinating to witness - author Norman Mailer as King Lear, Woody Allen as the Fool - as a Cannon produced film which, for the company's love and notoriety as the creators of the likes of the American Ninja franchise, comes from the period where they signed contracts with major filmmakers like John Cassavetes to Raul Ruiz for prestige and gave them some leeway as a result¹. The sense that Menahem Golan in particular was out of step to who Godard was becoming, dealt with in Electric Boogaloo as being dismissed by Godard, is when a real phone call from him to the Swiss filmmaker during its protracted gestation, where he wishes for it to be get premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, is played in the opening over the words:

A

Picture

Shot in the Back

 

Whilst a playful film at times, King Lear is also a melancholic work. Beyond the constant seagull sounds in the soundtrack, there is a droning nature that appears here and there in the soundtrack, a vast tapestry, where the orchestral music on the score malfunctions constantly, and many voices interlacing and overlapping each other. It feels apt as, in this world set post Chernobyl where everything returned except art and culture, this follows Godard's ongoing issues with the state of the world in terms of cinema and culture in general. The film is from the second "mainstream" era of his career in the eighties, which is inherently deceptive as Godard, whilst a legendary filmmaker, was never conventional from the beginning, already slipping away from his original popular films in the sixties until his complete rejection of it in Week End (1967). The misbegotten Dziga-Vertov Group era, whilst with its virtues, took place and then there is the ultra obscure mid-to-late seventies era including extensive television work. This second mainstream era, from Every Man For Himself (1980) until into the nineties, is deceptive in that he works with name stars and fictional narratives, from a Isabelle Huppert in that film to Johnny Hallyday in the underrated Détective (1985), but his narratives are giving way to didactic essay structures which would eventually turn into essay films in his late years.

It could come off as an older man shouting at clouds, to paraphrase the Simpsons, as Godard complains of the state of culture, but this has clearly been something which enters his work very early in his career and took hold of him. But let us not forget that this is also one of the more perplexing things to exist, in context, which I also wish was more readily available. That, with its initial set up we follow William Shakespeare V, the ancestor of the Bard played by Peter Sellars, not that Sellers before anyone is surprises, the legendary British comedian, but the American theatre director who co-wrote this adaptation and plays a descendent, hired by the Queen of England and the Cannon Cultural Division, absorbing the producers of this film into its world, to recreate the lost texts of his legendary ancestor.

Its key plot points are that one of the people who can help him is Professor Pluggy, played by Godard himself as a barely coherent and yet wise sage whose assistants are a fire obsessed young man played by Leos Carax, soon to be the legendary director of the likes of Holy Motors (2012) and his girlfriend played by Julie Delpy. Godard in manner and acting, especially when he has the red woollen hat on, even with his trademark cigars and glasses, looks like a drunken character you find in a bar scene in a Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film. His voice is close to it too and early in narration, you effectively get what would happen if he wanted to try a Michael Caine voice. That narration is there as Norman Mailer was briefly in the production, at the same time directing the notorious Cannon produced Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987). We see Mailer, proud as only a legendary Pulitzer Prize winning author can be with the tenor of his voice to match, completing the script to a King Lear adaptation set in the world of mafia, which is not absurd and blasphemous to consider when Akira Kurosawa just two years earlier adapted this play to Ran (1985) in the world of samurai and created a late masterpiece. Mailer left the production as, with his real life daughter Kate Mailer playing Lear's daughter to him, an incest aspect was being placed into the material. So instead, in stand ins to Norman and Kate Mailer, as much as playing King Lear and one of his daughters Cordelia, we get Burgess Meredith of the 60s Batman series as well as a prolific acting career, and Molly Ringwald of The Breakfast Club (1985).

King Lear from that could be held as a perplexing surprise as a result. It is actually a film of three sides - a serious film, a humerous film, and a later narrative Godard film, such as Hélas pour moi (1993), where the drama is fragmented in heavy analytical theories and references to other culture. One is that, yes, this cast and the context make the film one of the oddest to exist, especially as (whilst a figure cancelled in modern culture in the 2010s onwards) Woody Allen is in the film in a small cameo at the end still. Godard himself was a big figure so his own role, part Holmes film side character but with electric cables dangling out of his hair like dreadlocks, like a Swiss Techno-Hippy, is a cherry on the cake when he mumbles in English and, in one rebuttal to Sellar's Shakespeare, farts as his answer. This film not surprising befuddled many, a review from Vincent Canby of the New York Times saying that this is "as sad and embarrassing as the spectacle of a great, dignified man wearing a fishbowl over his head to get a laugh"², which I think Godard could have easily done here in character for a point. Poignantly however is that, alongside not being dissimilar to the rest of his films from the era, how this farcical light is contrasted by an ominous mood is palpable, where pig noises eventually hit the soundtrack, screaming, and one scene has a bed soaked in blood when the sheets are lifted up. For all the chaos and farce, the one aspect from King Lear kept, alongside quotations from the text, is itself a huge part of his film's heart. Cordelia, in the play, rejects her father King Lear's offer, which here has Molly Ringwald's word of wanting "Nothing" turned to "No Thing" in the Godard trademark of onscreen text. This is a prominent aspect of the film, its true narrative, because of how Shakespeare V learns how the image itself is subjective, its emotional effect more important but the image is not tangential, prominent as Shakespeare himself has to travel around and effectively recreate his ancestor's work from inspiration of those around him he meets.

The struggle of artistic work, and the fact that language and images themselves are fickle, could sound like Godard is a fuddy duddy, but it has been a huge part of his work including the moral conundrums it also raises. He had probably been inspired to create the project years before, as Histoire(s) du cinéma's first "episode" appeared in 1988, but here in a scene in Professor Pluggy's editing room you have two tiny screens which splice and juxtapose different images, from a Tex Avery cartoon to the famous razor to the eyeball sequence from Un Chien Andalou (1929), a prototype of that project's M.O. Here I will admit that, having once in my early twenties hated most of Godard's work trying to watch it, and only becoming an admirer after a lot of adaptation and patience, I personally have never attempted to analyse Godard, and think even blasphemously that his cinema is as much improvised as it is razor focused. What you can grasp, and helped if you can get the references, does favours, as for a film with its absurd origins and content has a darkness felt in the juxtapositions of art by Francisco Goya, a bleakness of the state of the world. For all the dicey politics Godard has nearly shot his feet off with, one of the most noble found in Histoire(s) du cinéma, and evoked again and again in his later essay films of the Millennium, is that cinema failed civilisation when the World War II and the Holocaust happens, and to not turn this lighter hearted film review in a bleak one, his later years beyond his sixties feels like a man, after his ill advised Dziga-Vertov Group years, who has felt the weight of responsibility in his own films and grappled with the morality of filmmaking as a result of ideas like this of his.

King Lear is still bonkers, frankly batshit insane, and I do not think curse words in a Godard review is inappropriate. Godard as the wise Prospero of The Tempest, in his Swiss island away from the world making films like The Image Book (2018), would probably not find it an insult when the entire project comes from strange circumstances. (Sweetly, when interviewed by Katherine Dieckmann for an interview called "Godard in His Fifth Period", in the run up to his King Lear production, it does have the sentence from him saying "I haven't seen any of the movies they [Golan and Globus] financed, but I really want to see the Chuck Norris movie...", whichever that one was he was referring too³.) Yet there are snippets which reflect he was taking this film seriously. It does look gorgeous, even if you were stuck with a VHS rip for a film not easily available, as cinematographer Sophie Maintigneux imbues the film, shot in Switzerland, with both moments of serenity in the woodlands but also moodiness whenever indoors. The sound design is startling once you get past the seagull sounds.

And there is meaning here. Ringwald, on the Electric Boogaloo document, expressed confusion about the whole project, but her Cordelia is one of the more consistent figures. A figure of innocence, she rejects her father's love and is willing to endure the most of it. Her confusion is that as ours, looking at herself in the mirror in a green tiled room at herself, but when the film is explicitly referencing Joan of Arc (including Robert Bresson's 1962 adaptation) that is a loaded metaphor to place on the character. ([Spoilers] Especially as she is found dead on a rock sacrificed by the end, by a executioner with a spear, which is taken from the original play itself. [Spoilers End].) Even accidental connections have greater weight, such as Meredith starring in a Jean Renoir film The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), apt as Sellars' Shakespeare V is introduced at a restaurant with a book on film "auteurs", with no text, legends like Orson Welles without the context of their filmographies as he ponders on Renoir's father, the acclaimed painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, becoming more fixated on young women in his art as he aged.

That the film, for all its notoriety and dense difficulty, obtuse to say the least, has one legitimately beautiful and profound moment does spar it from any accusations of Godard pissing against Cannon's wishes. Breaking his own rules by presenting an actual moment of magic only possible in film, he shows the reconstruction of a flower, with its petals reattached, in reversed footage in a scene Jean Cocteau would have been proud of. That this act, in narrative, is from Godard's Professor Pluggy, sacrificing himself to do this act, and with his body dissipating into a reel of film afterwards is itself a profound image to leave on. That the film itself was never going to be a box office success was obvious, as Cannon should have realised even his eighties films, with narratives, were not like Breathless (1960) at all. But they should have been proud, for all their annoyances with him, for not being lazy either.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Moody/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

 

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1) Even if, as talked of by him in the Electric Boogaloo documentary, French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder had to take a chainsaw into the Golan-Globus office and threaten to cut his own fingers off to finish Barfly (1987) the way he wanted to, impressing Golan as a result.

2) Sadly requires a subscription to read, but the link to the original review is HERE.

3) From Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers) (Conversations with Filmmakers S.) from the University Press of Mississippi.