Reviews

Leave it up to Monsieur Godard to shoot his first film to directly address the Palastineans since Ici et ailleurs in '76 in Sarajevo with a cast that includes US Marines, Native Americans in full traditional regalia, and Godard himself in counter-sermonizing flesh. At least, and this is much more than trivial record keeping, the maestro has found a way to render his digital photography as gorgeous as the celluloid variety for which he is well known. The quality of the video images takes Notre Musique miles beyond the wan DV sections in Éloge de l'amour. This is all the more interesting considering his response, during the film's central writer's conference, to a question concerning whether or not digital cameras can save cinema. Godard stares into his DV lense and says nothing; the question cannot have an answer other than the one to be provided, immanently, vis-a-vis the unwinding of our collective species activity. Godard, as always, is best when he resists the unavailing temptation to answer the questions which constitute him as one of the most compelling artists of the 20th Century. Though his autodidactic flights of fancy may fail to soar as solidly as before, his discourses remain ultimately profound, his metaphors as unstintingly powerful as ever, his plagiarism as unflappable. He has begun to rely again on Borges, which is always good, and there is much less Merleau-Ponty. The only major flaw of the film is the opening section "Hell" (yes, Dante is backstage here folks), in which the montage is more of a groantage, in the manner of a Baraka (God no!) more than anything Eisenstein might recognize as dialectical. "Heaven", however, is wonderful. All Godard does is take the US Marine anthem at its word.

long with his other 70s masterpieces, especially Prime Cut (72) and the recently Richard Linklatterized Bad News Bears (76), Michael Ritchie's Smile delivers a sweet/caustic backhand to American patriarchy in all its denim-clad grotesquery. The Man, here, is all embodiments of the Capitalist win-at-all-costs ethic. He comes in the form of pyretic little league coaches leveling universal ennui upon the children, good IL' boys who tidy up business affairs by grinding up the competition in the abattoir, their women kept it the stables, or, in the case of Smile, the Kindermensch of Santa Rosa's local business elite whose wealth and importance to the community are paid tribute with a gleefully calamitous Young American Miss competition. The tone and structure of Smile are reminiscent of Milos Forman's Polish films, especially Fireman's Ball. It shares that film's depiction of a public event as national microcosm, and its brilliant harmonic ability to sustain social critique with a full-out, warts- and-all sympathy for its all-too-human characters. The film's gonzo feminism will doubtlessly stick grinding in the throats of the Steinem set, and it certainly doesn't idealize, presenting its bevy of beauties as an estrogenic infestation, immediately plugging the theater's pipes with Kotex. Still, it is the strange phallic world of spectacle that encases these women that remains ultimately suspect. Witness the drunken, Masonic gathering where the men of the town don robes, overturn picnic tables and pucker up before the great unwashed posterior of a skinned chicken carcass. A must see American meltdown!

Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit is, to put it mildly, an immensely welcome addition to the Criterion roster. It is uniquely modernist, impressionistically rendered, sensual in its physicality, and absolutely unlike anything to precede it in Japanese cinema. To put it bluntly, Ko's film is as significant a break from aesthetic (and moral) traditions as Godard's Breathless would prove to be two years later. The story – nominally an attempt to cash in on the "sun tribe" fashion, whereby children of the wealthy would wile away their summers sun bathing and boating (an unthinkable luxury before the 1950s) – follows the travails of two selfish and licentious brothers whose love of the same girl yields to hyperbolic tragedy of epic proportions. Whether the ending is meant as a conservative suggestion of the moral repercussions precipitated by the making idle of one's hands, or something more bleakly Sartrean, is up to interpretation. What is clear is that none who see it shall ever forget. An epochal masterpiece, based on a book by the current mayor of Tokyo!