In Which Nothing Is Here But Everything Is Permitted

Versus Godard

by BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI

Is everything permitted to the one who loves? For example to spy through the slats of the blinds, or to seek in the beloved's garments the signs of his intimacy, or to rummage in his pockets to touch all the objects that, proofs of his betrayals, become proofs of his existence...

Strong in the love that I have for the cinema of Godard, I fish here in troubled waters, and I discover, precious as only the "real" can be, the "vulgarity” of Godard.

I am speaking of Godard‘s two most recent films, which I saw recently in Paris, their sound mixing scarcely finished, in the following order: Deux on trait chases que ie suit d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her); five minutes of recreation (those are Godard’s words, or as, laughing, he said to me "fine del prime tempo”—end of the first part); then, Made in USA.

I think Godard expects a single judgment on these two films; he finished filming Made in USA one summer Friday and began Two or Three Things the following Monday. He edited the two films at the same time, probably in two connecting cutting rooms, like two hotel rooms for an illicit couple. Another prosaic observation — the order in which Godard showed these two films lets one suppose that he prefers Made in USA projected last. (Dulcis in fundo.)

Godard must be a great devourer of newsprint; one can find the origin of his two films in last months' newspapers. The idea for Two or Three Things: comes from a news item read in Le Nouvel Observateur: a married woman (about thirty years old), mother of two children, living in some housing development, prostitutes herself each time the desire seizes her to transform herself from mother of a family to consumer of all those products that neo-capitalism offers to Frechwomen — Paco Rabane dresses, sunglasses, Polaroid cameras, and so on, all things whose acquisition her husband, an auto mechanic and radio ham, cannot guarantee her.

As for Made in USA, it is the Ben Barka affair, revised and corrected by Dashiell Hammett and Apollinaire, with Anna Karina in the role of Humphrey Bogart and Godard in the role of Howard Hawks. Comes the dreaded moment, the instant of the choice that Godard — not without masochism - imposed on us to make when he decided to shoot two films at the same time and to show them one after the other. Thus his victory will be his defeat and his defeat his victory. While Two or Three Things is at its origin a news item, Made in USA is drawn from a political assassination. Let us call to our aid Roland Barthes, who enlightens us on the difference between these two terms; the political assassination is always by definition a partial fact that refers necessarily to a situation existing outside it, before it, and around it: politics. The current event, on the contrary, is a total, or more exactly, an immanent piece of information. It refers formally to nothing other than itself.

But here is Godard reversing this rule scandalously; Made in USA keeps a structure tragically closed, while the current event of Two or Three Things, which ought to have derived its beauty and its meaning—an immanent entity resolving itself into its immediate données— from itself, opens like one of those strange and ineffable flowers of dreams or of hallucinations, which never stop blooming, disclosing in their petals new existences, new vegetal contexts, unpredictable as the resonance that they were brooding over, the things it signifies and their dream duration is unforeseeable.

Now, Made in USA, a political film, a traitor to politics, paralyzed in its great freedom by an ideological conformity, its colors fading from the very fact of the magnificence of their enamels — never in cinema have reds, blues, greens, been so red, so blue, so green, and everything seems true to Atlantic City — which, like Alphaville, should have resembled Paris and on the contrary resembles Atlantic City really too much, just as the “toughs” who should have made one think of Franco-Moroccan gorillas are, more or less in spite of Godard, too "tough” and in the end are only "toughs" — and yet, Made in USA, — the one that I like the less of these two films because it is too Godardian to be able to be really good Godard, here it does have unexpected events, very violent starts, that shake its entire armature; then, its structure recomposes itself, strengthens itself again, becomes enclosed, anti-Godardian. I was alluding to the deaths of the minor characters whom Godard has Anna Karina kill, and which are the sublime moments of the film.

It is as if the old man with the odd Eastern accent, or the writer who is Belmondo's double or the parallel policeman, existed first of all thanks to the bullets that they encounter. Thanks to their blood, and thanks to Karina, who, after having fired, addresses long looks of comfort to them. Godard makes them live in making them die, one by one, and, to end with, we are encircled by these poetic deaths of minor characters.

But it was with Two or Three Things I Know About Her — "her," this is the moment to say it, is not Marina Vlady, but Paris — that I really felt the pleasure of Godard’s "vulgarity." I call “vulgarity" his capacity, his aptitude, to live from day to day, close to things, of living in the world as do journalists, who know how to arrive on events at the right time, and pay for this punctuality by necessarily undergoing the effects even of the most trivial, like the duration of a match flame. This "vulgarity" is to be a little too attentive to everything, and for that we are deeply grateful to Godard. It is for us that he risks that, because it is to us and for us that he speaks directly, to help us, men existing around him, and that is why it seems that he addresses himself always to someone who is very near him and not to eternity. Thus a monolithic current event, like that of Two or Three Things I Know About Her, which could be extinguished in itself, becomes "means," "vehicle,” of a discourse that concerns us all. The prostitution of the women of the housing developments is only the pale reflection of the prostitution to which we have all, more or less differently, adapted ourselves, but with less innocence than Marina Vlady with her animal, peasant gentleness.

This new Godard full of anger and pity at the same time makes a single gesture and embraces innumerable souls, who are behind innumerable windows of suburban buildings and whom no one would mourn if floods or the bomb were to cross them out of the world forever. The light becomes pink and blue on the resonant partitions of the low-rent apartments; It is a light that we know already, and that resonates familiarly in us; it is the sun of work days, Wednesday or Thursday, in colonies that do not know that they are colonies (in Made in USA, I had forgotten to Say so, everything seems to happen between ten o'clock in the morning and six o’clock in the afternoon one Sunday in July, the bistros almost deserted, boredom for whoever remains in the city).

During this time someone speaks alone in the next room, and the walls are so thin, that everything that he says reaches us distinctly, like the words of the priest behind the grating of the confessional. It is Godard who speaks a monologue in a low voice. like a speaker operated on for cancer of the throat, and who says the rosary of his reflections on cinema and cinematographic style, questions himself and answers himself, protests, suggests, speaks ironies, explains to us that the shots, whether they are fixed, panoramic or dollied, are autonomous, with an autonomous resonance and an autonomous beauty, and that one must not preoccupy oneself too much with foreseeing a montage, for in every way the order is born automatically starting from the moment when we put one shot after the other, and that ultimately one shot is worth as much as another (Rossellini knows that), that if they are charged with poetry, the relationship will be born in spite of everything... and when his extraordinary moral discourse is seized with a slight shaking — and that often happens — it is as if the presentiment of a tragedy were assailing us; the characters of Two or Three Things I Know About Her will end their day with death, or by turning off the lamps by their beds, either ending not making much difference.

May 1967

In Which We Feel Ill Yet Considerably More Appealing Than Usual

Completely Organic

by ELEANOR MORROW

The Big Sick
dir. Michael Showalter
124 minutes

At one point, Kumail Nanjiani makes a short speech detailing what he likes about the woman named Emily (Zoe Kazan) he picked up at a comedy club in The Big Sick. (He does not mention that he liked that she was sick, but it is implied.) The things he primarily mentions are that she is in fact a woman, and that she is very fond of birds. When he finds out that she has an infection in her lungs, he has no reaction to it until he sees a graphic tee in her closet and remembers her wearing it. You see, a woman's personality is probably mainly a function of whatever clothing she donned at the time you chose her as your wife.

In other scenes, Kumail is made very upset by a series of Muslim women forced upon him by his mother (Zenobia Shroff). They are all quite lovely people and one even does an amazing magic trick; he never takes the time to get to know any of them. American culture, we may infer, has trained him to select a partner as alike to Zooey Deschanel as one can possibly manage.

In real life, Emily V. Gordon clearly has some talent outside of her passion for water fowl. She hosts a podcast for Christ's sake – do you think Saint Peter would dare look askance at her at the pearly gates? We never learn about that part of Emily except what the alarmingly engaging Zoe Kazan implies non-verbally. Instead we know only that she is a psychology student with very little grasp of basic human psychology. When Emily is placed in a medically induced coma during The Big Sick, part of us is greatly relieved, because watching two people have nothing in common except Whole Foods is not the most thrilling use of two hours.

The Big Sick picks up when Emily's mother Beth (Holly Hunter) and her father Terry (Ray Romano) come on the scene. It is suggested that Beth comes from a deeply anti-Semitic North Carolina family, and that Terry's ability to ignore their various taunts is what endeared him to her. Because Terry recently cheated on her during a work conference, she is very critical of him during The Big Sick. When he tries to tell a joke, she immediately puts down his sense of humor, and she frequently heckles him by shouting "Terry!" but since she is Holly Hunter, I don't think he minded.

Kumail does not have much in the way of an inner life, but he knows he must bond with his girl's mother so that she will forgive him for telling her he wasn't sure they had a future together, which is apparently the most nightmarish thing one person can say to another. His plan is to eat with Beth, and he even sucks down whipped cream from a can. This is bonding across racial lines, I guess, but The Big Sick doesn't try to force any kind of mutual understanding. In Chicago, everyone relates to everyone else on what is basically a surface level.

Some things that Emily and Kumail enjoy doing together are reading. They make out on a couch, and sometimes have sex. Once, one of them takes a shit while the other waits patiently. This is apparently true compatibility? I really don't know, I guess whatever works, but it seems like these two are going to encounter some serious problems down the road given that the euphoria inherent in taking drugs and watching movies with someone else generally wears off by the end of an evening.

I don't know that there was ever really enough in this meet-cute to account for a feature length film. But it is Kumail Nanjiani who carries the entire thing on his shoulders. As he seems to realize, his stand-up comedy is not terribly funny, and The Big Sick makes his true calling abundantly clear – he is an actor, with a natural ability to deliver all kinds of lines in a spare and convincing manner. While Zoe Kazan gamely struggles with the various awkward speeches she has to make at times, Nanjiani takes them at his own pace, showing how explaining and articulating yourself, no matter what the substance of your talk is, remains a moral act.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Give And Receive At Different Times

Hard to Say is This Recording’s weekly advice column. It will appear every Wednesday until the Earth perishes in a fiery blaze, or until North West turns 40. Get no-nonsense answers to all of your most pressing questions by writing to justhardtosay@gmail.com.

Hey,

My friend Sally often asks me for advice. We discuss the issues in her life at extreme length, as she does not operate on anything like a "gut level." Frequently, and especially with relationships, she has gone against not only what I recommended, but also what she herself agreed was best. I can accept that people I care about will sometimes be hurt of their own doing, but she seems to step willfully into situations that are obviously flawed in their premise.

It's gotten to the point where I am not sure what to say to her about such things. Maybe if she experienced deep horror firsthand, it would change her decision-making process? Do you think people do learn from their mistakes?

Also, how do I tell her I can't be this kind of sounding board because of how painful it has become for me

Dana S.

Dear Dana,

It is natural for some of us to become emotionally involved in the problems of others, especially of friends and family we know and care about. Sally has developed the same respect for you and your thoughts that anyone does for a tiny, impotent angel who sits on their shoulder. In other words, she strongly believes that you are no longer the least bit real.

It is at this point you should decide how much you really care abour Sally. If you are pretty distant from her troubles, I think receding into the fabric of heaven is more than your right. But if you really care for and want her to avoid doing something she'll regret, take it the whole way and really impose yourself on the situation. If she ends up resenting you, who cares? It's not like she is your wife.

Illustrations by Mia Nguyen. 

Hi,

Through an online dating website I recently met a woman, Ellen, who has just gotten out of her marriage of two years several months ago. At first I was hesitant to pursue things with Ellen thinking it would get complicated. We have a great connection, but it is not easy to handle the presence of someone else in her life with whom she has a long, shared history. Further complicating the situation is the fact that he actively tries to get her back. More recently, she spent an entire night sobbing when he sent her a long letter.

Honestly, I'm tempted to tell her to contact me once these issues sort themselves out. On the other hand, I do feel something with her I haven't with other women so sticking it out does have its appeal. What should I do?

Michael S.

Michael,

Participants in the degrading, sexist institution we call marriage have every incentive to stay in their committed, legal union. The tax breaks are just insane, and the thrill of unprotected sex pretty much never goes away. I am sort of joking, but sort of not.

When a woman leaves her marriage, it means that she is really not having it. There is one key exception to this situation — when her husband cheats. Then things are kind of up in the air because forgiving him is very possible and you could end up on the outside of this situation rather quickly.

Assuming that is not the cause of the divorce, you're probably in a far more stable situation than you imagined. Most women aren't going to jump into another relationship after something this serious goes haywire, so if she is sticking around, she isn't just experimenting and probably has actual feelings for you. If you are there for her during this difficult time — and not just as a pillow — she will remember that kindness.

On the other hand, if she starts having all night talks with her ex, you are free to express your disapproval and disassociate until she does.

Hi,

I recently met a guy, Aiden, through some mutual friends who is attractive, confident and fun to be around. The only concern I have is that he insists on meeting up at concerts that are frequently loud. He usually drinks to excess, and while he is great fun under these circumstances, the entire night is rather exhausting for a weekday. 

Maybe this kind of thing would have appealed to me when I was in my early twenties, but we're both in our early thirties and the idea of being a sweaty mess every time I see Aiden is a disturbing project. On occasion we will do other things, but it seems this is his idea of fun and he goes to two or three shows a week.

Marjorie W.

Dear Marjorie,

Compatibility means that you enjoy doing the same things at the same times, like going to shul on the high holidays, or interchanging each other's limbs so you can feed each other bagels chock full of gluten. Couples require these shared activities, or else they will begin to resent one another. The fact that you are already resenting Aiden's choice of fun this early on in the relationship is maybe not the best sign.

You will then wonder, will he grow out of what he enjoys? It's not impossible to do so, but since music is a wonderful expression of the soul, it would be hard to imagine he will suddenly enjoy listening to it performed. Maybe if you got him a really great stereo.