Made in U.S.A (1966)

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Anna Karina as Paula Nelson; Jean-Pierre Léaud as Donald Siegel; László Szabó as Richard Widmark; Ernest Menzer as Edgar Typhus; Kyôko Kosaka as Doris Mizoguchi; Yves Afonso as David Goodis; Sylvain Godet as Robert MacNamara; Jean-Claude Bouillon as Inspector Aldrich

An Abstract List Candidate

 

It’s like being in a Disney film starring Humphrey Bogart

The last Jean-Luc Godard film starring Anna Karina is a bright pop art crime pastiche, making this known just from the outset. Karina is in a checkered primary colored knit dress, taking out a diminutive man in her hotel room with a shoe; his unconscious form is left with his younger male relative and his girlfriend, the prone form laid in the middle of the bed as a typical Godardian conversation transpires around him. Looking for the murderer of Richard P…, the man Karina’s Paula was close to, Made in U.S.A. is however also stepped in melancholia. It was made on request of a friend of Godard’s, long-term producer Georges de Beauregard¹, but for me from the context of all films having a point eventually in the end, Made in U.S.A. was always a significant film, not the one which never got even a USA premiere until 2009², in how this would mark how the marriage of Godard and Karina would end, this would be her last film with him, and politics are unavoidable. In among its bright colours and the closing aesthetic of the later sixties is however around the auteur’s world absorbing the political world around them, even seen in how, in a fake out against Paula in a doctor’s office, she uncovers a fake skeleton wrapped in bandages and fake blood which befits the motifs of war and violence referred to over and over, including people being tortured off screen for information.

It marks a goodbye to two collaborators who were intertwined at the time, but in 1967 we would also see Week End, Godard proclaiming his career dead, and marking the end of his most well known era of cinema for more “difficult” films. Watching Made in U.S.A., marked as well by Jean-Luc Godard’s passing in 2022, his films even when he was “popular” in the French New Wave make that fame a weird lightning in a bottle moment for a director, at the right time, which always was unconventional. The title Made in U.S.A. is clearly fed on old American pulp with Karina as the sleuth figure, as much as pastiche French crime films, but most of this film is a series of sketches, wrapped around a narrative, with a lot of Godardian monologues. Many are clearly from him speaking through his characters, on the climate of politics as much as the past and future, the socialist left wing and the authoritarian right wing central here. His relationship with other cinema – the pastiches to Quentin Tarantino referencing Bande à part (1964) even for the name of a VHS publishing arm – really becomes curious when, digging into his career, Godard was from day one was undercutting his work. Passages here are close to the kind of non-narrative tangents of independent dramas and comedies, such following a male patron viewing the world in a bar as the counter kicking Katrina than visa-versa. Where this becomes marks his later “difficult” films is how more and more the political and sociological concerns are impossible to ignore.

The actual plot, splice and obfuscated here, is explicitly referring to Mehdi Ben Barka, the bright colours hiding a really dark and very real incident in its pastiche form. A left-wing Moroccan politician, Barka vanished in Paris in October 1965³, in which it was learnt the French police force were involved in helping Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel,  by making Barka “disappear”¹. Whilst it could be seen in bad taste to have this in context as the film’s template, especially as this was made only a year later from the disappearance, the film is not avoiding the real life politics it is made within, as Godard’s cinema could not avoid them by this point. The film, without any context of this, is a film noir tale re-imagined – the Walt Disney film with Humphrey Bogart and politics to smash together two different pieces of Paula’s narration – through a mess of intrigue and backstabbing, still political in how it deals corruption, how Richard P…., heard in voiceover only, is a victim of a conspiracy to silence him. Stills from American film noir representing his death, and it befits a film touching on a real conspiracy that this is how cinema and reality intermingle.

Whilst he praised Monogram Pictures in Breathless (1960), Godard also name checks literature and classical music in his work, and the cocktail here contrasting the encroaching political strife of the world ahead, reference to war throughout, against the luster of pinball machines befits this complete disregard between what is low and high brow subjects. The film, not withstanding one “Chinese” eye movement which has not aged well, does feel ageless elsewhere, a snapshot of the era where Godard was using his experimental style beyond just narrative to outside stories. This is also at the time when Godard got colour film in his hands and, undeniably, this alongside Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Week End emblazoned it in an incredible glow even for one of his more melancholic works. With how well composed this film is even among strong colour films from Godard in just this tiny window of his career, red as a colour looks entirely of Godard’s here with cinematographer Raoul Coutard, and that it is contrasted with the banal “real” France, of urban gas stations and apartments, does emphasis this aesthetic beautifully. Even here in the film’s melancholia, right down to Katrina’s blue eye shadow, the film can still have elegance to it, openly playing to comic book and pulp tropes, even stylistic ticks in a Batman-like sound effect onscreen for someone being knocked out at one point. Even when it stops for an extended Marianne Faithful cameo where the sense of sadness starts to rear its head, this film is thinking with its style and composition to a level that is unparallel, no longer the freeness of Breathless’s energy but thinking of how to look with meaning, something really important when Godard, even alienating his audiences, came to his later films.

When a character says Dickens and Melville were better than the search for truth, that rings as Godard himself speaking as he yet still embraced the trends of the time, something you realize when other members of the French New Wave were as much interested in pop culture as they were high minded, such as when Alain Resnais nearly collaborated with Marvel Comic’s Stan Lee⁴, or when decades later Chris Marker embraced Second Life⁵, an online multiplayer platform, for a virtual identity and to do interviews with the public from⁵. Whilst politics came to many of these directors from this movement, Godard was heavily affected by them, far from out of place here as a mere joke about having goons named Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara is contrasted by how, in its narrative about trying to find out what caused Richard P…’s death, and the political conspiracy behind it, Paula will still be affected by the emotional journey of the answer even if played as a jaunt at times. It feels, though she stands tall in the end, Paula feels desensitized, as with the sense Godard became. Despite a sweet final monologue between her and a male character that fascism will have to fade out as surfing and rock music does, it comes in mind that this would lead into the notorious Dziga-Vertov Group era of Godard’s career, where whether he succeeded or not, and at times even crossed the line by documenting how to create bombs in one of the films, it came apparent for him that more was required for him as a creator politically than he ever did before.

Made in U.S.A still has a lot of playful to it – the character of Richard with his unfinished novel, or Jean-Pierre Léaud playing a buffoonish goon revealed to deserve a gunshot for his troubles – but as the central plot involves past political campaigns, even the final monologue states how the old versions of left and right wing politics were not enough. As you see as Godard and Karina departed, so would Godard begin to change. The 1968 Cannes Film Festival, where he and François Truffaut led protests to shut the festival down in mind to protests transpiring at the same time in France⁶, would come as would Week End, and Godard would shift styles. The film, if marking close to the end of this period with other films up to Week End, does still have its frolicking experimentation, this passage where Godard was allowed to be experimental and playful all whilst seen as a huge figure at the period. Again, it is strange in a great way he was able to make films like this, and was seen as a sellable figure, but that was for the better. It also means that this does not feel like a “small” film despite the circumstances of its creation, as important and idiosyncratic as the others from the period, and full of its own creative virtues.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Whimsical

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

 

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1) For Nick, Sam, Nixon and Karina: Jean-Luc Godard’s Made In U.S.A, written by Adam Bat for Medium.com and published on November 13th 2012.

2) Made in U.S.A. – Godard spilt the beans on politics and atrocity, written by Peter Hulm and published by Global Geneva on December 3rd 2019.

3) France accused 44 years on over Moroccan's vanishing, written by Lizzy Davies for The Guardian and published on October 29th 2009.

4) Marvel mon amour: Stan Lee and Alain Resnais’s Unmade Monster Movie, from Criterion Channel, released February 26th 2018.

5) Chris Marker’s Second Life, published for The Criterion Collection on May 13th 2009.

6) Cannes 1968: The Year Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut Led Protests That Shut Down The Festival, written by Damon Wise and published by Deadline on May 18th 2018.