Infuriating Magician

The hero was a bent-nosed ex-pug who seemed too ugly even for character parts. His co-star was a round-eyed windup doll from Iowa whose debut had been a disaster. The director, an impoverished movie critic, made up the script as he went along, and shot much of the film by pushing his photographer around in a wheelchair, screaming instructions at the players.

The actors were Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, the director was Jean-Luc Godard, and the movie was Breathless, which in the eight years since its release has been generally accepted by critics as a landmark in movie history. It remains a typical example of France's nouvelle vague, with its theme of alienation, its air of improvisation, its lexicon of once-bizarre techniques--fast dissolves, ricocheting cuts, grainy camera work--that are now an accepted part of the moviemakers' craft.

Vermeer or Veneer? The most prolific of modern French directors, Godard has made 14 features since Breathless--a few of them critical successes, many more of them exasperating failures. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art is now paying homage to Godard with a retrospective showing of his films, including two recent works hitherto unreleased in the U.S.: Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Made in U.S.A., two disappointing works that nonetheless show flashes of incisive social satire and technical virtuosity.

Whether a Godard deserves a festival is a matter of some critical dispute. To Richard Roud, author of a worshipful new study of his movies (Godard; Seeker & Warburg), the director is "one of the most important artists of our time," worthy of comparison, with Joyce and Vermeer. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker calls Godard "the most exciting director working in movies today." On the other hand, Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic describes him as "a magician who makes elaborate uninspired gestures and then pulls out of the hat precisely nothing."

There is a measure of truth on both sides. Godard may be the most inventive cinema technician since Orson Welles--as well as the most infuriating. And for the same reason: to him, whatever rules exist are made to be broken.

Hisses & Asides. That has been true since the beginning of his film career. It was unheard of, for instance, to cut from the back of an actress' head to the back of the same head. Godard did it 18 times in Breathless. While making A Woman Is a Woman, he recalled a Chaplin dictum that comedy is life in long shot and tragedy life in closeup. So A Woman became a comedy in closeup. Cameras are supposed to record, not call attention to themselves. In My Life to Live, he had his camera swinging back and forth like a pendulum during one key sequence.

At Godard's rare best, that nonchalant imperviousness to precedent can provide the viewer with a shock of delight. There are sequences in his films that no other director would have dared to try, or could have brought off half so well: Alphaville's portrayal of the future as nightmare, achieved through location-shooting in present-day Paris; the bittersweet evocations of prewar Hollywood musicals in A Woman Is a Woman; the female mood of sensual boredom in The Married Woman.

Nonetheless, it is doubtful if Godard has ever made a totally satisfying movie, for the simple reason that he has never overcome his worst enemy--himself. Most of his films are flawed by preening and perversities, such as casting director-friends in bit parts. For all his reputation as a cinematic innovator, Godard is a surprisingly bookish director; his movies have yawning stretches of dialogue in which the characters natter on and on and on about sex, Communism, philosophy or the art of film making. All except hard-core Godard fans find it hard to share his enthusiasms for the long, listless photographic caresses of the beautiful but not very skillful actresses he has favored: Anna Karina (the first Mrs. Godard), Anne Wiazemski (the second), Brigitte Bardot, Marina Vlady.

Cash from Cahiers. Much of this self-indulgence is the posturing of a moody, neurotic recluse who has never stopped being at war with his environment. Son of a French Protestant doc tor from Geneva, Godard shocked the family by stealing and selling his grandfather's first editions to buy movie tickets. He enrolled at the Sorbonne solely to get a stipend from his father, who cut him off after discovering that Jean-Luc had misspent three years in Paris without attending any classes. Godard later spent some nights in a Swiss jail for refusing military service. Returning to Paris in the 1950s, he joined the staff of the avant-garde film journal, Cahiers du Cinema, jealously watching as two fellow writers, Franc,ois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, made their first films. To help finance his own, Godard melodramatically stole some petty cash from Cahiers--then got bailed out by his colleagues, who found a legitimate backer for him.

Since then, he has stolen nothing; other directors have borrowed from him. But in his most recent efforts, few have seen much worth imitating. Made in U.S.A. and Two or Three Things I Know About Her, which were churned out simultaneously--Godard worked on one in the morning and one after lunch --bear the errmarks of a man in a hurry. In Two or Three Things, which, like Edward Albee's current Broadway play, is about a circle of suburban housewife-prostitutes, Godard is both ponderous and slapdash. His camera focuses steadily on the coffee in a cup until viewers have grounds for stupefaction; the women's speeches are frequently obliterated by the roar of jet planes or automobiles. Made in U.S.A., which was made in France, is theoretically about the assassinations of Ben Barka and President Kennedy, but is actually an incoherent collage of people and places.

Not Bad at All. His latest movie, Weekend, which opened in Paris last month to typically mixed reviews, represents the essence of Godard. A classic highway traffic jam turns into a metaphor of civilization's decline and pall, replete with torn bodies, mangled machines--and a roving band of murderous hippies slaughtering and raping as they fly. The final scene: a woman gnaws on a bone that, the script suggests, may be from the body of an English tourist. "Not bad. Not bad at all," are the final words--if not the final judgment on the movie.

Godard's fatal flaw may well be his ability to make a film as easily and quickly as other men write letters: he has filmed as many as three movies a year. Almost always using the same trusted crew, Godard can wrap up a film in five or six weeks; to his producers' delight, he is never over budget. If he ever slows down, however, he may discover that the best is yet to be. After all, Antonioni and John Ford did not begin to make their finest films until they were past 40. For Godard, that milestone is still two years away.

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