The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 23-29
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Sure, Godard joined the ranks of the radicals in the May ’68 protests, and his ensuing “Dziga Vertov” period reflects his politics at the time. But the two films that preceded this particular creative stretch, his 1967 one-two punch of La Chinoise and Weekend, are by no means agitprop. In fact, as much as Godard may have been sympathetic to the Maoists revolutionaries-in-training in the former film, and as much as he clearly despises the bourgeois couple in the latter, it’s interrogation, not preachiness, that animates them both. Note how, during one scene in Weekend in which a working-class truck driver gets into a heated argument with a middle-class woman after a car accident that kills her husband, Godard also makes sure to include shots of gawkers either watching impassively or heartlessly laughing at the spectacle. Godard spares no one in his apocalyptic road movie, just as he refused to shy away from depicting the students in La Chinoise as dangerous in their naïveté. “The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome with more horror,” says one character at the end of Weekend, and certainly the film contains some of the director’s most horrific visions: Corinne’s (Mireille Darc) affectless sexual confession, the extended traffic jam, Emily Brontë’s immolation at the hands of Corinne and Roland (Jean Yanne), among many others. But the thieving, cannibalistic hippie revolutionaries of in the film’s concluding stretch are hardly painted as beacons that will point society in the right direction; they’re just yet another panel in Godard’s mosaic, a black-comic cry of disgust at a society broken beyond repair. Kenji Fujishima (March 26, 2pm, 7pm, 9:30pm at BAM’s “From the Third Eye: Evergreen Review on Film,” with a new preservation of John and Faith Hubley’s 1968 Zuckerland!)