Jean Luc Godard's Made in the USA is a smug bore of a film with the director riding high in his peak period during the Sixties that featured abstract works mocking narrative style and bourgeois lifestyle while embracing Maoism. While some of his works ( Breathless, Weekend, Alphaville, Les Carabiniers ) hold some fascination his overall canon is one of grand tedium where he drones on in endless political thought and non-sequitur with cloying pretense and name dropping for the post modernists to dig. Enter "USA," looking like a refugee from a Jaques Demy musical, featuring another of Godard's obsessions, adorable wife and muse Anna Karina seeking out the man who murdered her husband. Wearing some pretty Paris frocks and inflecting monotone Godard gets the rest of his cast to go along as well while slathering his jarring but underwhelming compositions in gaudy color, sloppily editing (signature Godardian artistry) then sitting back and waiting for the art house critics to proclaim this dull goulash a "subversive indictment of..." take your pick.
Along with Fellini, Bergman, Kurasawa and Truffaut Jean Luc Godard was part of the foreign film movement that helped transition film appreciation in America from entertaining block-busters to carving out a niche in the market with small personal art films. His first feature Breathless is considered for its introduction of a new film language (ellipses) the birth of the new wave. After that came a series of similar broadsides against the decaying West that may well be still going on today given the old guy is still making highly obscure films. But the game was up by the end of the 70s and all very evident in this flaccid mess (sorely missing the camera work of Raoul Coutard) re-hashing the same theme, ideas, distance seen in all his other works. I admire Godard for still be able and desiring to make films in his 80s. But given his messy incoherent, filmography he may be more con artist than film artist. Looking back at that seminal moment in film history where film editing changed forever, John Cassavettes Shadows (59) seems to have beat Godard and Truffaut to the punch. For Godardian loyalists only, especially the ones willing to fall for his Big Sleep re-make blurb and his hackneyed visionary politics that might aptly re-tile this mess as Made in Venezuela.
Along with Fellini, Bergman, Kurasawa and Truffaut Jean Luc Godard was part of the foreign film movement that helped transition film appreciation in America from entertaining block-busters to carving out a niche in the market with small personal art films. His first feature Breathless is considered for its introduction of a new film language (ellipses) the birth of the new wave. After that came a series of similar broadsides against the decaying West that may well be still going on today given the old guy is still making highly obscure films. But the game was up by the end of the 70s and all very evident in this flaccid mess (sorely missing the camera work of Raoul Coutard) re-hashing the same theme, ideas, distance seen in all his other works. I admire Godard for still be able and desiring to make films in his 80s. But given his messy incoherent, filmography he may be more con artist than film artist. Looking back at that seminal moment in film history where film editing changed forever, John Cassavettes Shadows (59) seems to have beat Godard and Truffaut to the punch. For Godardian loyalists only, especially the ones willing to fall for his Big Sleep re-make blurb and his hackneyed visionary politics that might aptly re-tile this mess as Made in Venezuela.