Jean-Luc Godard
1964
94 minutes
This is a Godard film with a plot about a married woman who has an affair, gets pregnant and doesn't know which man is the father. But with Godard the plot isn't always the interesting part. It's more interesting to have the camera move "through walls" while the woman walks room to room. Or just to have her to flip through a bunch of spicy record albums with nude or lingerie-clad women on the cover. Or to have weird grey radiographic shots that look like photo negatives. Or showing weird too-close-up shots of the faces and bodies of the leads as they talk to each other. There are lots of close ups of ads, especially ads for bras and panties and other intimate consumer goods. It's like watching a ninety minute bra ad. It's more of a vibe than a film, and it's quite a good one. The story is not terribly interesting, but the way the story is told is honestly kind of riveting. It doesn't look like any other film you've ever seen, for better or worse. You can't really bring yourself to care much about the central conflict in the film, but you also can't look away and are eager to see how the story gets told.
As a street photographer, you actually like to use ephemera to "tell stories" in your own way, taking photos of such things as graffiti and posters and temporary advertisements of all sorts. You're a bit excited to see someone doing the same thing quite intentionally in filmmaking, where they make a point of capturing the spirit of the times or setting a general tone through things like ads or posters or even postcards. Another film by Godard (Les Carabiniers in Section 212, if you haven't been there yet) does this as well in a long sequence toward the end, except mostly with postcards.
Sometimes when you're watching a film you find yourself wanting to pause the movie just to look at all the signs and magazines and decorations in the background just to figure out what kind of a time and space the characters are living in. They're in a music club? What kind of club is it? What's printed on the posters on the wall, what bands are going to play in the club on a night they aren't there? What kinds of things are shaping their world? Is their world the same as ours? What books are on the protagonist's bookshelves? What kind of magazines does she read? What TV shows do they watch? What things shape their world and their worldviews? It feels like this film is answering some of those questions in a weird, sloppy, crazed sort of way, and you're all for it.
Time to choose something different: