First Name: Carmen (1983)

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville

Loosely based on Georges Bizet's opera Carmen.

Cast: Maruschka Detmers as Carmen X; Jacques Bonnaffé as Joseph; Myriem Roussel as Claire; Christophe Odent as Le chef; Jean-Luc Godard as Jeannot

Canon Fodder

No one needs an atomic bomb. Nor a plastic cup.

Jean-Luc Godard is Mr. Jeannot, a patient stuck in a hospital, a has-been director pretending to be sick to stay in his room on threat that he will be kicked out by the staff, living there with a stereo player which he will have at his head like boom box sometimes. His niece Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), who visits, becomes one of the leads, Godard's loose adaptation of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen having her be a member of a group, posing as a film crew, who rob a bank. The equivalent of Don José, the soldier who falls in love with Carmen from the source, is Joseph (Jacques Bonnaffé), one of the bank guards there who falls in love with her mid robbery, joining her.

Godard was always unconventional. His eighties output is stranger knowing he clearly wanted to transition to experimentation post 1968, his Dziga-Vertov Group work, but returned back to narrative cinema from his second "debut" Slow Motion (1980). This second "mainstream" run before he went to, arguably, the post Film Socialisme (2010) era as the elder statesman, still has experiments within them, and the more I see these films, First Name: Carmen the more narratively driven of a few, the more it becomes obvious he was still interested in narrative dramas even if he would gracefully move away from them. Far from having to become "mainstream", it was more he found narratives which he could tell, with his other concerns, which were still interesting to the audience alongside the experimentation.

This is also the films from when Anne-Marie Miéville, an important Swiss filmmaker by herself, is important to consider, meeting Godard by accounts in 1970, at the Cinémathèque Suisse in 1970, their relationship growing further after his near-fatal motorbike accident in 1971¹. Their collaborations in the seventies into the eighties mean a lot for me in context - the Historie(s) du Cinema and post-Film Socialisme work feel indebted to their collaborations, experiments in video for television and short films, sadly not readily available to see, and for the eighties films, she worked in this "mainstream" period as a screenwriter, a co-writer or here for First Name: Carmen the sole screenwriter, as an editor, and as a general collaborator which gives her a significant weight to this era of films alongside how Godard was changing in his own right too in this later period.

Here, Godard with Melville makes a narrative film but, like even his sixties output, this among the other eighties and early nineties films I have seen move like sketches and character dramas than actual plots, even when a group armed with gun abruptly storm a bank out of nowhere. That Godard has an older man sitting nonchalantly during a gun fight, reading his newspaper until he is shot, really emphasises as well how he had a tangential attitude to plot, include farcical moments like this, even if the character drama still drives this film far more than others from his output. The central romance a tense one, effectively a more sexually frank take on his sixties films where Carman's romance with Joseph has left her precarious among her own group, he a latch-on to theirs. It is frank in how sexually explicit it is in nudity, but it is equal opportunity, Bonnaffé as much as Detmers to bravely bear all onscreen. Bonnaffé also has the most explicit moment of self touching; in fact, whilst an entirely different film in atittude, that moment does feel like it would appear in French New Extreme films decades later, a prototype more appropriately to the type of naturalism, including sexual explicitness, a director like Bruno Dumont would casually depict.

Godard is also making a film in eighties urban France, not the classic sixties France which he himself idealise with his pop art films. Neither is this the France of later productions from the nineties on with middle class characters in the narratives, but the world of gas station France with some extravagant locations just in-between a locations. Eric Rohmer among others like Godard wandered into this world, and whilst elegance is here, it feels fascinating to see a film this grounded and closer to the modern day in look, despite some technology and fashion, with its idiosyncrasies like VHS tapes and shell suits just touches of the time. Godard would even explicitly touch on these subjects, in dialogue and in terms of playing with the medium, like playing with a Triple XXX sign in neon and videotape in Détective (1985), so he was more naturally suited to play with the changing France onscreen. There is a sense, honestly as I will get into later, this era feels neglected, and because of the iconography of his sixties films codified what his style was for many, even parodied in the mainstream, whilst something this grounded, even if of the past, feels less comparable and closer to the modern day than images from the likes of Breathless (1960).

Godard's films, from the eighties within these environments, fascinate between how he stretches and kicks even against plots, wanting to clearly wanting to bend the form, and also a sense of melancholia found in certain films. First Name: Carmen is the least experimental of the lot I have seen barring its use of sound. Intercutting continually to a strings quartet practicing in a room, the soundtrack is very idiosyncratic and one you would never get for a film like this in another context. The soundtrack can switch to gulls, to abrupt silence, to using his Beethoven but also suddenly having Tom Waits at one point, even within that scene having both Waits and strings at the same time. Here, as he would also lean on very recognisable names in his work onwards, from Bob Dylan to Scott Walker, Godard would be playing with soundtracks onwards, heavily as well showing he was good at choosing choice music cuts for whatever purpose.

As for the melancholia, in contract to a King Lear (1987), the most infamous of his films from this run, a Shakespeare adaptation by Cannon Group not made by someone who read Shakespeare, or to actually follow the source, First Name: Carmen is a languidly paced and tragic tale of love between two people which will not come to be. He has his humour within this still - the man spooning a jar of food, in a Mobil garage mini-market bathroom of all places, springs to mind - but this still a sombre and ultimately rewarding drama as a result. It feels a forgotten film for me, which is odd to say, felt only in how, with titles from the eighties in general, even King Lear, his output from this era is frankly maligned, Carmen not a film talked of greatly. Again, his sixties work, to be honest, casts a shadow on who he is as a film maker until Film Socialisme onwards, where his more experimental work from the 2010s has the benefit, for incredibly radical work that would be difficult to sell, of a legendary name to sell them on. This is a shame as, with the eighties films incredibly rewarding, this among them as a drama is a highlight.

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1) Love and work differently: Anne-Marie Miéville’s cinema of companionship, written by Albertine Fox and published for Sight and Sound magazine, in an updated version, on June 20th 2018.