Collision of Ideas

Jean-Luc Godard faces off with rock, drugs and the black revolution in Sympathy for the Devil; the result is pretty much a stalemate. The film is fragmented, delirious and didactic, sometimes to the point of stupor. But it displays the incontestable energy and stylistic daring that have made Godard the cinema's foremost pop essayist.

Sympathy for the Devil,* filmed in London in 1968, is rather formally divided into sections: Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones performing the title tune over and over again in a recording studio; a group of black guerrillas bloodying white girls and reading excerpts from black writers in an auto graveyard; and a wraithlike creature named Eve Democracy (Anne Wiazemski) wandering through the woods, giving an interview to a pursuing film crew. A narrator intrudes from time to time to read selections from a mythical political-pornographic novel (" 'You're my kind of girl, Pepita,' said Pope Paul as he lay down on the grass") that are outrageous and very funny. The result of the separate episodes, however, is not a coherence of ideas or images, but merely a collision.

Raunchy Liturgy. For years, Godard's films have been essentially free-association essays. Recently he has become less interested in culture than in politics. Films like Le Gai Savoir, for example, are basically director's monologues, with actors as mouthpieces and the audience made mute witness to sometimes incoherent polemics. Sympathy for the Devil is a kind of transitional work, an attempt, albeit unsuccessful, to blend aesthetics and revolutionary politics. Unfortunately, Godard's symbolism is shopworn. The automobile graveyard as a symbol of Decadent Culture is as much a cliche of the New Cinema as riding off into the sunset was of the Old. Godard's constant use of acrostics, anagrams and linguistic puns ("Cinemarxism," "Freudemocracy") reads like old issues of TIME. The Stones' song, which through constant repetition becomes a raunchy liturgy, is musically outstanding but lyrically pretentious. "And I shouted out, 'Who killed the Kennedys?'/When after all it was you and me," typifies the level of political sophistication in much of the film.

As is usual with Godard, many of the images--like a climactic one of the bloody corpse of Eve Democracy being borne aloft on a camera crane --are crazily beautiful, and the photography is impeccable. Godard makes films quickly and cheaply. If they lack consistent intellectual quality, they possess a vigorous timeliness. Godard is like a manic eclectic, rebounding from issue to issue, composing a body of work that in years to come may look like nothing so much as a cracked mirror of our time.

*A slightly different version is titled 1 + 1.

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