Jean-Luc Godard’s 1980 film Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie), known in the United States as Everyman for Himself and in the United Kingdom  as Slow Motion (on account of its most conspicuous special effect), has just finished a welcome revival at Film Forum.  Often hailed as Godard’s “second first film,” a moniker that originated with Godard himself, on balance the film both fits and eludes this definition.  What is not in question is that the film marked Godard’s return to the European film industry, and it was his first film to have a theatrical run in the United States since Tout Va Bien in 1971.  He has been working steadily, if not as prolifically as in his unsurpassed first decade, ever since: promoting his work at the usual festivals, granting interviews, and doing his best to remain the enfant terrible of the cinema with his generally oracular persona.  While even by Hollywood’s low standards the last thirty years have marked a coarsening of movies (with the rise of the Steven Spielberg “Blockbuster” as an emblem for this trend in Godard’s own view), Godard’s work has become more difficult, relentlessly so in some cases (see King Lear), to the point where critical opinion, noblesse oblige aside, is thoroughly divided between enthusiasm and bewilderment, to say nothing of the experience of the casual viewer or even the fan of Godard’s earlier work.

But Godard would not have had it any other way.  As his most recent biographer, Richard Brody, has noted, Godard’s offhand comment to an interviewer at Cannes in 1960, two months after the premiere of Breathless, accurately predicted what would become a tumultuous relationship with critics, audiences, and the industry.  Godard observed, “I have the impression of loving the cinema less than I did a year ago – simply because I have made a film, and that film has been well received, and so forth.  So I hope that my second film will be received very badly and that this will make me want to make films again.”  Part of why Godard had this impression about his “first first film” is because of how well it was received, a fact that is difficult to overstate.  Because of Breathless, Godard was touted as the next Orson Welles or D.W. Griffith: a director whose first film both reached a popular audience and revolutionized the medium.  Positivists might speculate that Godard bristle at such praise on account of his privileged upbringing and background.  He didn’t need the money; unfortunately, his underwriters did. 

At the beginning of Everyman , twenty years of fighting and bitterly compromising with the cultural establishment is clearly wearing on Paul Godard (Jacques Dutrunc), Jean-Luc’s avatar and the protagonist of the film, as we find him making phone calls from his room at what could also have been Adorno’s residence, “The Grand Hotel Abyss.”  Despite the tenseness exuded by Paul, the scene has a comic charm.  His neighbor in the hotel is a soprano wailing the “Suicidio!” aria from La Gioconda.  Godard bangs on the wall when her singing interferes with his phone call.  Then in an inspired absurdity, they both leave their rooms and the hotel alone but together.  She continues singing as they navigate to the giant hotel’s exterior: as they wait for the elevator; while they descend the escalator in the lobby. 

If there is a meaning to this unreal coincidence it is perhaps that the properties of an out-of-place fragment of an opera are transferable to Paul and by extension Godard himself.  La Gioconda is making a heroic sacrifice in killing herself, after selflessly helping her lover escape, to avoid a life of servitude to the villainous Barnaba.  It is not simply that such a heroic sacrifice for love and freedom is no longer possible in the film’s modern context.  Rather, it is as if the possibility of heroism is a nagging question for Godard, one that will not go away.  He wants to be a ruthless businessman of a director, a TV producer who doesn’t look for inspiration or worry about political struggle anymore, and yet romanticism is following him into the elevator and fighting with him over a taxi.  But if it won’t go away, still it isn’t possible for it fully to return.

“If I had enough courage I’d do nothing. But since I don’t I go on making films,” remarks a embitter Paul later that day to a classroom of aspiring students.  The saddest thing about this line, as Paul himself doesn’t hide in the least, is that it isn’t even his.  It belongs to Marguerite Duras, who he was supposed to bring to the class but failed to deliver.  The quote from Duras, like the a cappella aria, is nothing new in Godard’s films.  He has always been fond of borrowing fragments from cultural and artistic traditions.  Far from signaling a lack of inspiration, the accumulation of such fragments signals Godard’s underlying aesthetic, that of the melancholy allegorist.  Godard is painfully aware that the tradition of art has been subsumed and corrupted by capitalism; but he refuses to give in, holding up fragments from that tradition as a badly damaged moral compass within an a-historical consumer society.

The twist that Every Man gives to this well-known pattern is that Godard, through his avatar, steps out from behind the camera and into the frame. (Finally two films later, in Prenom: Carmen, he dispensed with avatar and began to play himself.)  Thus one experiences the dying, noble tradition not as a multimedia collage interpolated into Hollywood pastiches and peppered with leftwing cant, but as the cross Godard feels he must bear.  And it makes a difference when he is pestered by the classical music instead of the audience, or has to say his deep thoughts to a half-bored classroom instead of whispering them in voiceover to shots of beautiful women.  In both cases the melancholic as tragic hero has become a clown.

Another result of implicating himself in such a wilted, self-loathing protagonist is that the roles assigned to women are freed of the victimhood and scapegoating of the “first” Godard.  Paul’s girlfriend Denise (Nathalie Baye, who won a Cesar for her performance) is leaving him, but not, as in earlier Godard, for another man or with no plan at all.  She wants to escape the city, the relationship, and her stressful job at the television studio.  The film is masterfully ambiguous on the meaning of her new dream.  Is it a regression to want to live on a farm in the country and write for the local newspaper?  Or is it an attempt to grow up and move on?  Perhaps it’s both.  In any case, Godard’s camera loves Baye in the film, particularly when she rides her bicycle on country roads in slow motion.  The same roads where cannibals and interminable traffic once resided in Weekend are now safe for a bit of carbon-neutral afternoon exercise.  If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.

Denise’s double, the film’s other woman and the only one not physically repulsed by Paul, is the most conspicuous remnant from earlier Godard: a prostitute named Isabelle, played with robotic precision by a young Isabelle Huppert.  The film is divided into a series of chapters with titles that recall Godard’s cinematic essays from the Sixties: “The Imaginary,” “Fear,” “Music,” etc.  Isabelle first appears in the film around the beginning of the chapter marked, unsurprisingly, “Commerce.”  She picks up Paul outside a movie theater; I guess he didn’t really want to see the film.  Though the Every Man marks her for its more desperate and humiliating acts, she’s not just a victim.  And even as victim she seems to have been instructed to play the part so as to inspire as little sympathy as possible.  In any case, in a scene that would have been impossible for the first Godard because of censors and a certain antiquated patriarchal version of authority he naïvely presumed, Isabelle’s sister comes to visit her.  In need of money to help friends make bail, she wants to join the oldest profession.  Isabelle doesn’t try to convince her not to; she just wants to make her aware of what it will mean.  When her sister remains intent, she asks to see her breasts; judging them acceptable, the conversation moves on as if nothing traumatic had occurred.  At the end of the film the car that runs over and kills Paul is driven by one of the sister’s clients.  What’s left of her humanity compels her to roll down the window to examine the body.  It’s the most sympathy Paul has inspired in the entire film.  Her john decides it will be a hit and run; Paul’s ex-wife and daughter similarly abscond.   

When the film was originally released in 1980, it was mostly at odds with the satisfaction of many on the French Left who had just swept the socialists and Mitterrand into power.  Thirty years later, with its vision of a society connected seemingly only by exploitation, Every Man’s time has come.  It’s an art film for after the neoliberal crisis from the moment when its seeds were just being planted.  But alas, the timeliness of the film for current political and economic realities is hardly worth dwelling on.  Most people go to the movies to forget such realities; and even the small fraction of those that do go to see Godard will be more interested to know the fortieth anniversary print of Breathless returns to Film Forum just after Every Man leaves.  After all, something has to wash away the bitter taste of the latter.

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Tahir Rahim in A Prophet

In the final sequence of Jacques Audiard’s engrossing crime drama, A Prophet, the attentive viewer will notice a deft choice of soundtrack.  The tune is a familiar one, Brecht and Weill’s ubiquitous classic “Mack the Knife,” but the rendition is obscure: a droll country arrangement sung by Jimmie Dale Gilmore (who himself achieved screen immortality as “Smokey” in The Big Lebowski).  Gilmore’s “Mack the Knife,” with its mixture of the familiar and the unexpected, is a nice emblem for Audiard’s film, which is able to refresh some of the most conventional aspects of the American gangster film—the improbable rise to power, the double-cross, the camaraderie amongst criminals, and of course, the charismatic anti-hero—by relocating them to contemporary multicultural France.

The film follows the survival, education, and triumph of one Malik El Djebena (played with understated aplomb by Tahir Rahim), a young man we meet at the beginning of the film on the first day of his new life in the French penal system.  His crime is vaguely defined and like everyone else in jail, he proclaims his innocence.  The rest of Malik is equally inchoate.  He doesn’t know his parents and has no connections in the outside world.  He can’t read or write.  He’s Arab, but when asked what language he learned to speak first, French or Arabic, he answers, “Both.”  In response to questions about his religion at the beginning of the film, Malik is similarly divided.   When a prison guard asks him if he has dietary restrictions, Malik appears not to understand the question.  When the guard simplifies it to “Do you eat pork?”  Malik first answers “No” and then hesitantly “Yes.”

In Mike Judge’s Office Space, we learned that in order to survive in prison you either have to kick someone’s ass or become someone’s bitch.  To play it safe, Malik does both.  The Corsican mafia that dominates the other inmates with the help of the corrupt prison guards is ordered by its home office to liquidate a new prisoner and underworld rival due to inform at a trial within weeks.  Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), the informant, is Arab and gay.  Malik is handsome and conveniently located on his cellblock for temporary stays and new entries.  For these reasons and because they prefer not to risk one of their own for the mission, the Corsicans, led by their diminutive, Napoleonic elder statesman Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup), decide that Malik will do the killing for them.  The short story of Reyeb’s assassination is a cinematic tour-de-force.  Malik is in way over his head, and thanks to Audiard’s visceral direction, so too are we the viewers.  In the yard when the proposition is made to him, his fear is unrefined.  He shakes and shifts his eyes unsteadily amongst his “protectors,” especially as he’s warned that any attempt to shirk responsibility will result in his death rather than Reyeb’s.  Foolishly, he tries to back out anyway.   But rather than meeting with the warden per his request, the Corsicans visit his cell to remind him of the extent of their power with a mock execution.

What follows is the beginning of Malik’s education.  Getting to justly suspicious Reyeb will not be easy.  Malik must learn to put a razor blade in his mouth and act natural; then call it forth into his teeth at a second’s notice to slash his target’s throat.  It is one of cinematic murder’s more athletic forms.  Malik’s training sessions, in which he first pretends to stimulate his instructor’s genitals and then leaps up and puts the blade to his throat, are thorough and he practices diligently, but he lacks talent.  In the event, he’s shaking with fear and adrenaline, which Reyeb seems to mistake for nervousness about their impending sexual encounter.  But when Malik realizes blood is dripping from the side of his mouth that contains the razor, he gives up waiting for his victim to enter a more vulnerable state.  The struggle that ensues between them is contained by the film, but just barely.  The murder is a chaotic masterpiece and the audience is more witness than spectator.  The scene recalls the realisms of Hollywood’s greatest contemporary purveyor of violence, Paul Greengrass, and its greatest critic, Michael Haneke.  But Audiard manages to surpass them both: not so much in the way the event is depicted, though arguably there too, but in the way it inflects the rest of the film.  In dreams, in waking life, Reyeb obstinately haunts Malik’s coming-of-age.  The idea that murder afflicts the murderer’s conscience is one of the least represented in all of cinema.  Just before Malik offs him, Reyeb encourages Malik learn to read while in prison.  After he learns that his deed has earned him Corsican protection, the first thing Malik does is enroll in the prison’s language arts class.

That Malik’s journey from anonymity to the French equivalent of Michael Corleone is improbable is an accepted convention of the film’s genre.  But advances in the complexity of crime and police procedural genre television, such as The Sopranos and The Wire, are beginning to make the arc of cinematic storylines like A Prophet’s seem strained.  On The Wire, for instance, there is no need for one character to remain in an impossible state of grace while the criminal world explodes around him.  If it is logical or probable that a lead character should meet his demise, the show has plenty of other plot lines to follow through on, given its multivalent narrative structure.  Audiard’s genius in A Prophet, however, resides not in apologizing for the improbability of his hero, but in the way he magnifies the unlikelihood of Malik’s success.  It is literally a divine circumstance.  Malik is a prophet (and a Muslim one at that).  He has visions of the future and a guardian angel in the form of Reyeb’s ghost.  He undergoes a spiritual transformation while in solitary confinement for forty days and forty nights.  In the final battle sequence, his opponents’ bullets travel in slow motion while he playfully hides under a corpse.  Perhaps most notably, at the moment when Reyeb’s criminal partner deduces Malik’s part in his friend’s murder, Audiard resorts to a kind of secular deus ex machina.  Their car strikes an antelope that Malik has seen in a dream, at which point his enemies begin to believe.

But the real miracle of the film is the care that goes into its moving parts.  The camera work is often astonishing.  The film score is moving but unobtrusively atmospheric.  Reyeb’s intermittent and surreal presence is a distant allusion to the work of David Lynch; but rather than terrorizing Malik, Reyeb’s ghost adds depth to Malik’s character.  He is living for them both now.  Audiard uses surrealism to do the most difficult thing in storytelling: to show the inner life of his hero rather than merely recite it.  But above all, the film is carried by its actors.  Tahar Rahim plays Malik with an awkward grace best exemplified by the strange boyish mustache he wears for most of the movie.  It is the one part about him that is equally French and Arab.  But it is Niels Arestrup as Cesar Luciani, Malik’s protector, mentor and archenemy, with his virtuosic oscillations between unflappable calm and rage, who supports the film where it otherwise lacks foundation.  At each step in Malik’s journey toward criminal mastery, Cesar is there to remind him, quite violently in fact, who it is that guarantees his existence.  And yet with each one of these tirades one notices the emperor’s robes looking a little more threadbare.  Of course it doesn’t help that the Corsicans’ numbers in the prison are dwindling while the Arab population swells.

One scene in particular is a testament to both actors, but particularly Arestrup.  With the help of a recently released friend and another who is an experienced hash dealer on the inside, Malik has been using part of the release time Cesar bought for him to begin smuggling hash into the prison and controlling its distribution.  Then in an instance of what business professors call “the curse of competitive markets,” rival hash dealers are angered by the newcomers and kidnap Malik’s closest friend, Ryad (Abel Bencherif).  Malik responds by kidnapping the rival gang leader’s mother and ambushing his brother inside the prison.  When the hostage exchange is made and Malik is riding high on his success, he has the misfortune to happen upon his old boss, who has recently gotten wind of Malik’s new, independent operations.  With a cup of coffee and a fatherly curiosity Cesar masterfully draws out Malik, who is only too happy to confess his recent accomplishments.  Then Cesar shows why he needs anger management courses.  From across the table, he seizes Malik by the neck and forces the spoon he had been harmlessly cleaning with his tongue under his protégé’s eyelid, all while explaining to him that he has risked losing his leave days that Cesar counts on to negotiate his business affairs in Marseilles by proxy.  After this interview Malik never lets his guard down again.  Cesar’s final lesson serves his pupil only too well.

“Mack the Knife” has perhaps the most unlikely history of any American pop-song of its era.  In 1958, more than two decades of The Threepenny Opera premiered and a little over a decade after Brecht improbably cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee despite being blacklisted anyway, Bobby Darrin rode the “communist” murder ballad to the top of the Billboard charts and a Grammy Award at the height of the Cold War.  Similarly, if the quality of a film is any indication of its box-office potential, then Malik, a Muslim gangster who weakens the Corsican mafia while consolidating Arab organized-crime, is destined to endear himself to audiences on the opposite side of “The War on Terror.”  But then again, cultural differences aside, Americans have always loved a good criminal.

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The White Ribbon directed by Michael Haneke

Michael Haneke’s latest film, The White Ribbon, is easily his least controversial and most audience-friendly work. It has already earned many honors including the Palm D’Or at Cannes, three European Film Awards, and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign picture. It is also the favorite for the Foreign Film Oscar next month. Set in a remote German village, the film follows the lives of its villagers at an auspicious moment, the year leading up to the First World War. But that traumatic event is hardly a concern to them. Their trouble is that someone in their midst is committing violent crimes seemingly at random. A doctor falls from his horse when a trip-wire is set outside his home. A peasant-woman dies in a purported accident at the mill. Months later the Baron’s son disappears and is found traumatized from a sadistic torturing. The police are summoned but the crimes continue. The film’s interest resides in solving the mystery. Its mood is sometimes menacing, occasionally comic, and for the most part austere in the way that cineastes have come to expect from the Austrian auteur.

The White Ribbon’s stated purpose, and Haneke is nothing if not an oppressively didactic director, is to examine the origins of Fascism. To this end it features a first for a Haneke feature film, a prominent voiceover narrator, in the form of the village schoolteacher vaguely recalling the film’s events in his old-age. This accounts in large measure for the film’s accessibility if also for its presumptuous moralization. We get a tentative hypothesis to start: maybe the generation born around the turn-of-the-century turned to Fascism after studying and experiencing the hypocrisy and depravity of their forefathers. The secret message of the film, however, seems to be that these children are at bottom unaccountably evil.

The film is beautifully rendered in monochrome, achieved by filming in color and then reducing the picture to black-and-white. Call it, if you will, an unwitting metaphor for Haneke’s oversimplified account of the rise of Fascism. Or is it instead a programmatic choice made to correlate with Haneke’s first foray into historical period drama? Perhaps it’s both: history in the film is distorted by the narrator’s memory; yet this distortion comes across as an authoritative distillation of the moment rather than the product of an inaccurate recollection.

The dialogue in the film is some of Haneke’s finest, ranging from ribald to brutally honest, and it has the happy effect of counteracting the film’s too general historical claims. Particularly memorable is an exchange between the village midwife (played by Haneke ensemble mainstay Susanne Lothar) and the local doctor (Rainer Bock). The latter undergoes the most dramatic transformation of any character in the film and could be called its antihero. In an early scene he plays the victim and receives our sympathy when he falls from his horse. His children are also probably the most likeable characters in the film. But after this argument he is no longer the victim if not wholly the perpetrator either. The two have been carrying on an affair for some time, but it is hardly the kind Emma Bovary and her disciples dreamt of. The midwife loves him and in addition to working as his personal assistant has looked after his children since his wife’s death.

The nominal reason for their argument is a proverbial one. He can’t get it up and uses this as the tipping point to call it quits. His strategy is aggressive if not effective: tell her in the starkest possible terms that she disgusts you. The dialogue is some of the frankest I can remember in a recent movie. He tells her his imagination isn’t strong enough to conjure other women during sex anymore. She tells him she’ll do something desperate. He says he could care less. She accuses him of molesting his daughter and behaving more cruelly to his wife than he does to her. He gets the final word, which is all the crueler because of how bored and casual he seems when he asks, “Why can’t you just die?”

The Doctor isn’t the only abusive patriarch in the village, although his particular faults –incest, pedophilia—make him something of a team standout. Indeed, each village elder has a fault to match their position. The pastor (Burghart Klaußner) seems to relish punishing his children a little too much. For their part, his oldest two tend to give him a reason. The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) endangers, neglects, and then patronizes his workers. His steward (Josef Bierbichler) viciously attacks one of his boys, which passes for normal by the time it occurs in the film. The only authority figure who doesn’t seem to appreciate a little of the old ultra-violence is surprisingly the school teacher. He’s too young and distracted by love to care as much as he should about beating, molesting, and generally tormenting his students. But in the end he has perhaps the most violent idea of anyone about the identity of the criminal, an idea which even the draconian parson recoils from.

The white ribbon of the film’s title is worth examining here. Early in the film the parson punishes his two oldest children for not being home in time for supper in part by forcing them to wear a piece white ribbon on their person for the foreseeable future. It is something he had them do when they were younger, so that they would be reminded of purity and innocence. He had thought they no longer needed such prompting. Clearly he is unfamiliar with teenagers. But these teens are not ordinary adolescents. Their burdens are both heavier and lighter. Of course, on the one hand, when they come under their father’s cold gaze, they have the audience’s sympathy. But there is also something disquieting about them throughout the film. For them morality seems to be strictly an external institution, not something they feel within. In this sense the ribbon comes to stand for the fact that a message can fail to reach its destination. The only thing the ribbon seems to remind the children of is that they are still treated like children, in the worst sense. But ultimately perhaps the ribbon stands for not purity and innocence, nor even their opposites, but for the superficiality of concepts such as these in the face of a grinding and exploitative social order.

The irony here is that while The White Ribbon condemns purity to oblivion, Haneke’s whole program as a filmmaker up to this point has been in some sense to purify the contemporary cinema of its worst political distortions and technological pretentions. Indeed, Haneke’s output could be said to consist of a three-part logical form. His film’s perform a critique of some aspect(s) of existing cinema practice (usually a genre or an element of film language); but this essentially negative process of critique generates an ambiguous remainder in the form of a fascination with sensational violence; finally, his films, or the better ones at least, redeem this fascination with sensational violence by attempting to make viewers conscious of other more fundamental modes of economic and semantic violence.

The White Ribbon, indeed, contains one of Haneke’s greatest examples of this movement from sensational to economic and semantic violence. When the tenant farmer’s wife is killed in an accident at the mill, he is obviously distraught. But the cruelty of the situation is further compounded by the fact that he cannot complain about her death, let alone demand some kind of inquiry, given the extent of his family’s dependency upon the Baron, on whose property the accident occurred. The farmer’s silence is, as one might expect, drowned out by the righteous indignation of his son, who fights with his father over whether they should take action and later uses his scythe to the destroy the baron’s lettuce patch as revenge. The result of the son’s action is not justice, but its distortion. The baron fires the farmer’s daughter from her steady job and the family can be assured of losing its seasonal employ in harvesting his crops. They go, in other words, from bad to worse; from only motherless to near starvation. And the only act in the whole exchange that society considers a crime is the destruction of the lettuce.

But all this is merely the set-up for a punch in the gut. After his oldest son returns from prison and all seems to be returning to its place, history repeats itself. One of the farmer’s sons opens the door to the barn in the midst of his daily chores and finds his father hanging from a rope. And like his father before him he is unable to outwardly grieve. He turns around to see his younger siblings laughing and playing. He doesn’t interrupt them. He walks back into the house and we see his older sister, looking tired and anxious, busy preparing a meager dinner. Again he doesn’t interrupt. He sits down at the end of the room and the scene ends.

When Haneke accepts the Oscar next month, it will not be for this kind of inexorably logical storytelling. But it should be. He will get it instead for having made a subdued prequel to the cinema of the Holocaust, the Academy’s preferred genre. Yet Haneke’s explanation of the rise of Fascism is hardly historically grounded, nor for that matter is it psychologically convincing, as it needs to rely on an almost mythic criminality that is tantamount to nihilism. The achievement of this film lies not in its stated relation to events outside itself, but in its details. The story of the tenant farmer’s decline is perhaps Haneke’s finest depiction yet of the violence inherent in an economic system. 

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