Film
PIERROT LE FOU In which Jean-Luc Godard takes a machete to the cobwebs and ivy covering the crazy-love crime drama, subverting a workable genre plot into a dizzying meditation on artistic, romantic and cinematic freedom. The lovers are sell-out writer Jean-Paul Belmondo and femme fatale Anna Karina, whose fates are bound in B-movie fury from the moment he drives her home; the next morning, she breezes into the room, singing, while the camera coolly dips to observe the corpse on the bed with a gash in its neck. The lovers run, because that’s what lovers do in the genre—but they chafe, their love fades, and soon Belmondo resents being drawn back into her plotline of “sound and fury.” The camera frequently pans away to a literal ocean of unexplored possibility, while Godard lets the tumbling free association of wordplay, literary allusions, musical numbers, ad copy and movie shout-outs sabotage the film’s forward momentum: nothing is more paralyzing than the freedom to do anything. His perpetual camera subject is the heat of cool: in Karina’s careless beauty and Belmondo’s roguish charm; in fast cars and pulsing rock ‘n’ roll; in colors that, in Janus Films’ knockout new 35 mm print, are as hot and intensely focused as the sun through a magnifying glass, with lipstick reds slashing through every other frame. The result fits guest-star director Samuel Fuller’s definition of cinema: “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence and death—in one word, emotion.” Liberating in its willful messiness, this 1965 whirligig makes everything else in theaters now seem 40 years older. In French with English subtitles. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at the Belcourt)
THE KINGDOM Aside from the occasional murmured reference to Iraq and the so-called War on Terror, Peter Berg’s The Kingdom is little more than a run-of-the-mill kill-’em-all fuck-you—a film in which the good guys (which is to say, the white guys) spend two hours tracking down the bad guys (which is to say, the brown guys). It intends to boil the audience’s blood within minutes, as dozens of U.S. citizens living in a Saudi compound are machine-gunned and blown to smithereens by jihadists. There are countless images of dead children and their grieving parents; Berg, whose directorial style could best be described as anxious, wants us demanding our pound of flesh before the end of the first reel. So in comes the cavalry, an FBI investigative team consisting of Jamie Foxx as the commanding officer who finagles his way into Saudi Arabia without the Secretary of Defense’s OK, and a cast of other replaceable parts whose only definable tasks are to shoot or get shot at in this made-for-Fox News movie bereft of a brain. It’s all so much noise and nonsense—a hateful waste, adding nothing to the dialogue about war, loss, sacrifice and intolerance save for yippees and hell-yeahs. —Robert Wilonsky (Opens Friday)
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