Jean-Luc Godard
1967
90 minutes
You can't go wrong with this film, with Godard directing and a budding romance between the ever-youthful Anna Karina and Heath Ledger playing high school students in a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. You're eager to see what Godard does with a Shakespeare play, since apparently he directed a version of King Lear as well, as you'll see in Section 204--one of the films on your watchlist you're most excited for!
Okay, so that was a lie about the Heath Ledger. And the Shakespeare. And the Anna Karina. You're probably getting this confused with something else. But it is indeed Godard being Godard. This is another lightly-plotted film with a bunch of EXPERIMENTAL plumage that's pretty and gets the job done well. It's sixties housewives being consumerist bourgeois prostitutes and other such statements with intertexts and close-ups of brassiere ads and fourth-wall-breaking interviews with the camera and other obnoxious shit that would fall apart immediately if Godard wasn't the cheeky monkey at the reins.
This is a surreal empty-souled hellscape mockumentary about a day in the life of a typical bourgeois housewife, who like many housewives in French New Wave films, has a side job as a prostitute during the day. It follows her going about her vapid consumerist life with the other housewife/prostitutes. She first goes and drops the kids off at a daycare that seems to also double as a brothel (for adults). Then she goes to "work". One of her johns (an American journalist named John Bogus) pays her for a threesome with another prostitute where they first have to parade around the room naked with bags on their heads with airline logos on them. Then she gets distracted thinking about Vietnam. She goes to a cafe and there's some guy reading out excerpts of random books while another dude writes them down, and another woman fan talks to a Nobel prize winning author, which is every dude's dream. Finally the woman's husband gets home and she tries to talk to him about philosophical topics but he's too tired and not in the mood. It's hard to know if this description makes it sound more or less feminist than it actually is, but it's a lot to digest.
The bags on the head bit reminds you of The Gong Show, a 1970s variety comedy show that was ostensibly a game show. One of the acts on it was The Unknown Comic, who would come out and perform jokes in rapid procession while wearing a bag over his head. Another performer was Gene Gene the Dancing Machine, who would emerge at random times and perform a quick dance to "Jumping at the Woodside" and/or "One o'Clock Jump" by Count Basie Orchestra while the audience cheered as though he were the biggest celebrity in the world and general chaos ensued. This made an enormous impression on you as a child musically and culturally. It was one of your first tastes of syncopation in music, and it also was the first regular black character on television that you recognized. To your parents' horror, however, whenever you were in public and saw a sufficiently large middle-aged black man you would get excited and point at him and call out "GENE GENE", hoping he would break into a dance. Your parents spent a lot of time apologizing at the grocery store for this issue.
You were happy that your half-sister, who spent her own formative years growing up just outside Chicago many years later, kept this tradition alive by mistaking any black man she saw in public for Michael Jordan. Rudimentary genetics show that this must be an autosomal trait since it apparently originates on your father's side but may be passed down to sons and daughters. You wonder if your father had such a Universal Black Man when he was a child, and you are a bit sad that your grandparents didn't stick around longer so you could ask them this question.
Time to choose something different: